


Where We Belong

by HiNerdsItsCat (HiLarpItsCat)



Series: The Buzz in Your Hearts [2]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who (TV Movie 1996)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesiac Eighth Doctor, Childhood Trauma, Classic Doctor Who References, Dark Comedy, Dark Doctor (Doctor Who), Episode AU: s12e10 The Timeless Children, Episode: TV Movie: The Enemy Within (Doctor Who), Episode: s01e06 Dalek, Episode: s03e12-e13 The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords, Episode: s05e12 The Pandorica Opens, Episode: s08e11-12 Dark Water/Death in Heaven, Episode: s12e10 The Timeless Children, F/F, F/M, Gallifrey, Gen, M/M, Minor Tenth Doctor/The Master (Simm), Modern Doctor Who References, Post-Episode: s12e01-02 Spyfall, Rose Tyler Needs A Hug, Spoilers for Episode: s12e01-02 Spyfall, Spoilers for Episode: s12e10 The Timeless Children, That Special Kind of Disgust That You Can Only Feel When You See Your Past Regeneration, The Hybrid Prophecy, The Master Is Literally His Own Worst Enemy, Thirteen is the Valeyard, Time Travel, Timeline Shenanigans, Timeline What Timeline, Valeyard!Thirteen, eight needs a hug
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-23
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:40:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 61,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22369591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HiLarpItsCat/pseuds/HiNerdsItsCat
Summary: “Claiming the mantle of the Hybrid, it’s making a promise: to stand in the ruins of Gallifrey, to break a billionbillionhearts to heal their own, to unravel the Web of Time…” She smiled. “It’s like any of our titles: it’s a promise that you make, the story you tell about yourself. So… now that we've destroyed Gallifrey, what would you think about giving the Web of Time a proper kick in the shins?”“You mean tear it to pieces?” the Master asked.“Of course,” the Valeyard replied. “What did you think I meant?”The Master and the Valeyard (formerly the Thirteenth Doctor) are the sole survivors of the annihilation that they themselves inflicted on Gallifrey after discovering the terrible truth of the Founders and the lie of the Timeless Child. But their revenge is far from over… and to complete it, they must journey back through their own history…Aka: in which two renegade Time Lords rampage through an episode of each of the Doctor's previous regenerations, in between occasional breaks for snacks and kissing.
Relationships: Eighth Doctor/Grace Holloway, Eighth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan), The Doctor/River Song, The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), The Master/The Valeyard (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor & Chang Lee, Thirteenth Doctor/River Song, Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Series: The Buzz in Your Hearts [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1610287
Comments: 142
Kudos: 334





	1. Prologue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _There's a mean storm coming strong enough to cut you down_   
>  _There's a war been waging: better get the children underground_   
>  _I know we're far beyond the point of no return_   
>  _Let's say we light a fire and be the first to burn?_
> 
> _Do you recall the day when we went wrong?_   
>  _Time is flying, ease your weary mind_   
>  _We'll be alone where the skies are grey, where we belong_   
>  _Time is flying, ease your weary mind_   
>  _We'll be alone where we belong_
> 
> **Setting:** Post-Series 12, Episode 1/2: "Spyfall"

Gallifrey burned around him, the screams fading into silence like the end of a beautiful symphony. His revenge, his glorious revenge for the lies and betrayal, for that horrible feeling of shattering as everything he had ever believed about himself crumbled—it felt both impossible and inevitable.

She picked her way through the rubble, heading towards him with an expression of satisfaction on her face, as though admiring her handiwork.

Because some of it _was_ her handiwork. They had discovered the awful truth and then found each other, knowing with a dreadful certainty what had to happen next: the impossible and the inevitable.

But they didn’t speak much before or during the process. They had been a bit busy, after all.

“You were…” But he had run out of words. ‘Beautiful’ wasn’t sufficient. ‘Terrible,’ perhaps, in the more cosmic sense of the term: an avenging god, an oncoming storm, something that had transcended the boundaries of what was possible.

He sank to his knees before he realised what he was doing.

She gazed down at him, fascinated. “Call me by my name,” she said softly.

He was confused but complied: “Doctor.”

“Try again.”

He frowned. “Doctor.”

“No. Not the Doctor,” she corrected him. “One more try.”

Her eyes held a gleam of something teasing… and something more.

It clicked. “Valeyard.”

“Got me,” she said with a slight smile. “Well done.” She held out a hand and helped him up.

It happened. It finally happened. There they were, hand in hand, just like they used to be, only now they shared the same vision, the same purpose, the same path.

 _At last, at last, at last…_

“Do you feel it?” she asked. “That little buzz in your hearts? Like we’re finally in the right place.” She squeezed his fingers. “Like we’re doing what we were made for.”

“Maximum carnage,” he murmured.

“You’re the one who told me—who will tell me, I mean. Not everything, not the crucial part, but you started me on the path that led me here.” She raised one of her hands to rest on his cheek. “So you’ll need to get working on that. There’s a race of beings from another dimension: the Kasaavin. They’re the key to this. Find them and, well…” She grinned. “…do what you usually do.”

“Succeed wildly until you foil my plans at the very last minute?” he asked, rolling his eyes a little.

“Oh, of course. What did you think I meant?” She regarded him fondly, her expression still teasing. “I’ll need to erase myself from your memories of this. I know you can’t resist a good brag.”

He briefly wanted to protest, but grudgingly admitted to himself that she had a point. It was a fantastic secret, and it would be so difficult to not throw it in her past self’s face the next time she launched into a self-serving lecture about how naughty he was for killing her pets.

“When it’s over,” she whispered, “wait for me. I’ll find my way back to you.”

“I’m going to be extremely angry at you, aren’t I?” he asked.

She gave a snort of laughter. “Why would that ever change?”

“I’ll probably try to kill you. Repeatedly.”

“Obviously you won’t succeed. Besides,” she said with a smirk, “it’s our version of texting, isn’t it?”

He kissed her as they stood together in the ruins of Gallifrey.

* * *

It was all like some kind of dream. 

Ada’s mind went in so many different directions: into patterns, pictures, and places. The places most of all—times when her guardians would take her further inside her own mind than she would ever be able to travel on her own, leaving her body paralyzed until she returned, unharmed but tired. 

But now there was a gap in her mind, one full of more uncertainty than she had ever experienced before. It was like trying to remember the notes of a song heard only once from a distance, only with images: peculiar devices, a city of lights glowing with fire instead, taking someone’s hand and stepping across, lying not on the floor but under it—and, throughout it all, the blur of a woman’s voice, warm and coarse at the same time. 

Ada Gordon stared into the fireplace, journal in hand, and tried to remember the lost music.

She heard a sound in the other room, like one of the engines she saw at the Adelaide Gallery grinding metal on metal, or a train derailing, or the ripping of space like a tear through fabric. But before she could rise to her feet, the door opened and someone walked through it: a woman whose familiarity surrounded her like a cloud of smoke. 

“Ada!” the stranger said, her expression a mixture of concern and relief. “This’ll sound daft, I know, but bear with me for a moment: what year is it?”

She blinked in confusion for a moment. “The year is 1834,” she said, wondering if she was in danger from this person who had barged into her home in trousers and a long coat. She stood up and prepared to run if necessary.

“And the exhibition at the Adelaide Gallery… when was it?”

What an odd question. “It was a week ago. Who are you, and what has brought you to my home?”

The relief on the stranger’s face intensified. “Oh good. It’s in the past. You’ve already got the memories; plus, minimal risk of a paradox, won’t have to deal with my past self accidentally interfering.”

“Your… your what?”

“You’ll understand in a moment, I promise.” Before Ada could get out of range, the woman placed a hand on the side of her head.

It all came rushing back at once.

“Doctor,” Ada gasped, gripping the back of the armchair for support.

“Hello, Ada,” the Doctor said with a smile. “I’m back.”

The sensation of wonder gave way to a feeling of indignance. “You erased my memories… even when I begged you not to. How could you do such a thing?”

The Doctor was silent for a moment, almost as if she was frozen in place. Then she looked at the floor, her normally upbeat demeanor shifting into something that could almost be grief. “I’m sorry, Ada. I’m so sorry.” She appeared to force her eyes back to Ada’s face. “I was so sure that I knew better… that I knew best, but I didn’t. I didn’t know anything, not really, not back then… and now I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. I know what it feels like to have information hidden from you, to have someone else think that they’re doing it for your own good… but I’m done with that.” Something in her expression hardened. “No more secrets. No more lies.”

Ada sighed. “I am still wounded by your actions, Doctor, but… I do appreciate your apology.” A question occurred to her: “Is that the only reason why you have returned to my time?”

The Doctor shook her head sadly. “No, unfortunately. I know that I don’t deserve this, after what I’ve done to you, but… I need your help. There’s someone in trouble and you’re my only hope of reaching them.” 

Something in her eyes was urgent in a way that it had only been when that strange man had attacked the crowd in the Gallery. If she looked like this now, then the situation must be truly dire. “What help could I provide you?” Ada asked.

“I need you to call one of your guardians.”

Ada hesitated. “You told me that they were aliens who were trying to invade Earth. You told me that their intentions were not benign.”

The Doctor looked away and sighed sadly. “I know… and it’s still true. But someone’s trapped in their realm and I don’t have any other way of getting them out. I know it’s a risk—big risk—serious risk—big _serious_ risk—and I can’t force you to help me… but I really hope that you will.”

But Ada couldn’t help asking, nor could she keep the ice out of her voice when she did: “Do you plan to rob me of my memories of this time as well?”

“No!” the Doctor protested, grabbing her hands. “No, I promise: whether you agree to help or not, I won’t tamper with your mind again.” She stared at her pleadingly, and for a moment Ada could have sworn that she saw galaxies in the woman’s eyes.

Ada took a deep breath. “Very well. I will try to summon them, though we may need to call upon Mr. Babbage in order to do it properly.”

The Doctor’s face lit up with a smile. “Brilliant. Utterly brilliant, you. I can’t thank you enough, I’ll—” She froze again, the barest hint of a twitch in the corner of her eye. “I’ll make it up to you,” she said, her expression changing into something that was more teeth than smile. “And no need to trouble old Charles—well, trouble him any further than I already have—I made a quick stop on the way.” She ran back to the other room, where Ada could now see a blue box approximately the size of a wardrobe, and disappeared inside the door. She briefly wondered how the Doctor could do anything in such a small space, but she then recalled the odd cabin that they had travelled in back and forth through time. This must be another one of those contraptions, she reasoned.

“Here we are!” the Doctor said, pushing the case containing the Silver Lady into Ada’s sitting room. “And here we go!” She pointed that noisy device with the glowing yellow tip at the case and the room filled with radiance.

Seeing the Kasaavin again nearly rooted Ada to the ground in fear, but she steeled herself and stepped forward into the light, hoping that she was not about to walk into utter calamity.

But their destination was comforting in its familiarity: the strands of thought, the flickers of light, the feeling of being watched over—even though that last one was transforming into a feeling of being _watched,_ without the protective elements.

She was used to being alone in this realm, and it was still strange to see the Doctor there with her, but even more peculiar was the sight of a third individual: a man sitting with his back against the trunk of one of the large tree-like structures.

“You waited,” the Doctor called to him cheerfully.

The reply was tinged with sarcasm: “I didn’t have much of a choice, did I?” He stood and turned to face them; as he did, Ada couldn’t help emitting a tiny cry of terror.

It was the man from the Adelaide Gallery. The one that the Doctor called ‘The Master.’” The one who chased them through time. The one that she had tricked into incriminating himself with the Kasaavins in the future—they must have dragged him into this dimension, like they had taken the Doctor when Ada first met her.

Then why did he and the Doctor look so glad to see one another? Why had she gone to the trouble of finding him here? What was going on?

“How long was it?” the Doctor asked him, moving past Ada to meet him.

“I didn’t bother to keep track,” the Master said. “Too long.” Something in his eyes became darker, even possessive, as he gazed at the Doctor. “Far too long.”

Then, to Ada’s astonishment—and, if she was being honest, _horror—_ he took the Doctor in his arms and kissed her.

And the Doctor _didn’t pull away._ In fact, she returned the embrace, running her hands up his arms and shoulders until she had pushed her fingers into his hair, drawing him even closer.

_They tried to kill one another._

Ada knew that people could be made irrational by the turbulent waters of their hearts—she was the daughter of Lord Byron, after all—but even so, this was incomprehensible.

 _Lethal weapons from another time, bullets in the floorboards, soldiers and Kasaavin, betrayal after betrayal… how are they doing_ _this_ _?_

She very nearly left them there. Even absent the sudden change in their attitude toward one another, something about this felt off in a way that Ada couldn’t name but which shook her to the core.

It was as though the order of the universe was beginning to crumble.

She wasn’t the only one watching them: the Kasaavin, either a single one or a multitude in unison, spoke up: “Your arrival was foolish, Doctor.”

Her lips reluctantly leaving the Master’s, the Doctor turned to face them. “Was it?”

“You will not be permitted to leave. You will rot here with the other traitor.”

She gestured back to the Master. “The rot doesn’t seem to have set in yet. Just checked.”

“And you _would_ know what I’m like when that happens,” the Master added, his eyes still locked onto the Doctor as though he was starving.

One side of her mouth twitched in a smile. “True, you weren’t really at your best back then.” She addressed the Kasaavin again. “Sorry, got a bit distracted. Here’s what I meant to say: we’re leaving, all three of us together, and you won’t stop us—can’t, more accurately.”

“The subject only passes through when we allow it,” the Kasaavin stated. 

Ada bristled a little at the term _‘subject.’_ “If you keep me here, would that not mean that I will be prevented from accomplishing whatever task made me a topic of your study in the first place?”

“We can separate you from the renegades.”

“Ooo, I like that one,” the Doctor piped up. _“‘Renegades.’”_

The Master’s expression twisted in mild disgust. “A bit tame, if you ask me.”

Ada frowned at both of them uneasily. There was a plan coming together, one that she did not understand, but which filled the air with the stench of malice.

“You were a bit foolish yourselves, letting me in here,” the Doctor said, “especially without any kind of precautions. Tell me… do you feel tired yet?”

“Tired?” the Kasaavin echoed.

“Come on, it has to be setting in by now. You’re here at the epicenter of it. Not to worry,” she added, stepping towards the nearest of them, slowly, “it’s just a soporific—well, the equivalent for you lot. Passes along through communication… and you do so much communicating, don’t you? Constantly chatting. Swapping information back and forth. A virus could spread through your species so fast… and it is.”

Ada could see the flashes of light around them beginning to dim. Even the vaguely-human shapes of the Kasaavin were less bright than they were a moment ago.

“So enjoy your nap. You’ll probably wake up in… a billion years? A couple billion? You’ll be so well-rested by that point—a good long nap does wonders for one’s mood. I once spent a few decades on Ellyria just dozing. It was a cloud planet, very low gravity—”

The Master sighed impatiently. “Getting a bit off track, love.”

 _“Fine:_ by the time you wake up, it’ll be too late for you to interfere.” 

“You cannot…” the Kasaavin began to say, but trailed off. It was though they were having difficulty maintaining their concentration.

“Sorry,” the Doctor said cheerfully, “must dash.”

“Old-school again, I see,” the Master muttered.

“Oh, I’m bringing back all the classics. Ready, Ada?”

“I… yes.” Ada said, wondering why the Doctor had not utilized this strategy the previous time. She held out her hand, which the Doctor took in her own while taking the Master's hand in the other.

“Sweet dreams,” the Doctor called, as Ada stepped forward into the diminishing light she knew she was seeing for the final time.

Reappearing in Ada’s sitting room, the Master took a deep breath, as though he was inhaling a lungful of fresh air after days of being cooped up indoors. “At last.”

Would he resume his violent acts now that he was free? Ada braced herself for another outburst.

However, the Doctor, who was still holding his hand, pulled him in the direction of the blue box in the other room. “I’ll just be a moment, Ada,” she said.

The Master followed her, almost meekly, staring down at their joined hands with the same hungry expression he had displayed before.

As Ada waited, she remembered Noor’s question about the Doctor when they met in Paris: _“Why are we trusting her?”_

At the time, Ada replied, _“I have seen extraordinary things with her. She’s wise and unafraid, and I believe in her.”_

She was no longer certain that those things were true.

The Doctor exited the box with an armful of books and equipment, which she placed on the table in a heap. “Here you go! Books on circuitry, programming languages, mathematical proofs, electrical engineering, _plus_ a few early examples of computers—don’t worry, I’ve included solar batteries: all you have to do is stick them out in the sun and they’ll keep a charge. Same for the mobile phones—your data plan’s _fantastic,_ by the way, unlimited in time and space, no monthly fees.”

Ada stared down at the pile in astonishment. “Doctor, what is all of this?”

“It’s all _yours,_ Ada: everything I wasn’t able to show you and more. You can learn it all, kick off the digital age, go full steampunk if you like—”

“You told me that I was not meant to have this knowledge, that history was—”

“Forget history!” the Doctor snapped. “I was wrong, and now I’m trying to make things right. You deserve this knowledge, you deserve to see more than the nineteenth century would have given you, you—” She pulled a device out of her coat and pushed it into the side of Ada’s neck; Ada heard a faint hiss and felt a sudden pinch. “—you deserve more time!”

“What have you done?”

“Making sure you don’t die of uterine cancer at age 36.” The Doctor returned the device to her pocket. “Not sure how effective it’ll be long-term, biotech’s tricky like that, but it’ll give you a few more years, maybe even decades.”

 _Thirty-six?_ The same age that her father died. “You’re changing history.”

“I’m _fixing_ it. I can _do_ that.” She placed her hands on Ada’s upper arms. “Do you know what one of the worst sentences in the universe is? _’Oh, if only she’d lived.’_ I hate that sentence. I _hate_ things being snatched away and I _hate_ being told that it’s _supposed_ to happen. Nothing is _supposed_ to happen: things just _happen._ History isn’t sacred. Nothing is written in stone. Your history isn’t written in stone either. The same is true for Noor—she didn’t _have_ to be captured and killed by the Nazis, so I went and rescued her! Things _can_ be changed! Things _can_ be made better!”

Her fingers were gripping just a little too tight. “Are you quite well, Doctor?”

“I’m n—” The Doctor cut herself off mid-sentence with a look of brief alarm. She took a deep breath and released her hold on Ada. “You’re going to do great things, Ada—not because history says so, but because of who you are: someone brilliant, someone who can see the potential in things and work out what _could_ be.” She grinned wildly. “I can’t wait to see how it goes.”

She was saying goodbye, which meant that Ada was running out of time to ask the question that had been haunting her all this time: “Why did you rescue him?”

The Doctor froze again, her earlier mirth vanishing. “That doesn’t matter. He won’t harm you or this time period again.”

“But what about you? He came here to harm _you!”_

“That’s between us—”

“Is it?” Ada interrupted. “I saw what happened in the Gallery, Doctor: he murdered people—some of them my acquaintances—and when I fired the steam gun at him, do you know what you did?” The Doctor looked at her uneasily… almost guiltily. “You stepped in the way. I was able to deliver a wound to his shoulder, but you stepped in the way.”

“You threw a grenade at him,” the Doctor said quietly. “I didn’t stop you from doing that.”

“Which was little more than a distraction. It did nothing more… and he was free afterwards to kill again. Now that I may review that incident with fresh eyes, I realise something that I had not before: whatever your history is with this man, it has tipped the scales in your soul so far that you were willing to trade innocent lives for his. You demonstrated that, through inaction rather than action, you would kill for him.”

A thousand stars seemed to burn in the Doctor’s eyes for one terrible moment… and then she smiled ruefully. “You’re so very clever, Ada.” Something in that smile hardened. “But save it for your studies, not for me.”

She turned and headed to the open door of that box where, Ada now saw, the Master was casually leaning against the doorframe, his expression triumphant.

“Goodbye, Ada,” the Doctor said without looking at her.

“Goodbye, Doctor,” Ada said flatly.

As the door closed, Ada heard the Master say to the Doctor: “I noticed that you didn’t correct her about your name.”

But the Doctor’s—if it was in fact the Doctor—reply was inaudible from where Ada stood, and any other noise was soon drowned out by the metallic sound of the blue box’s departure.

As Ada returned to her chair in front of the fire, she noticed that her hands were shaking.

She had witnessed extraordinary things in her life, many of which were at the Doctor’s side, but it had not occurred to her that it was possible for someone to be impersonated that precisely. In fact, had they not encountered the Master again, Ada might never have noticed a difference.

Because there _was_ a difference: something harsher, an anger hidden just below the surface, a wound that would never close.

Some mysterious ally of the Master, perhaps?

Except… the way that he looked at this impersonator, with that desperate intensity, as though he couldn’t decide whether to wrap his arms around her waist or wrap his hands around her throat… it was the same way he looked at the Doctor during their confrontation in the Adelaide Gallery.

Combined with the real Doctor’s actions in the Gallery… Ada had hoped for her accusations to be met with a protest that no one, not even the most wicked of men, deserved to die… but the person she had just spoken to did not offer one.

Which presented Ada with a new hypothesis: that this dangerous creature _was_ the Doctor… but not anymore.

Ada turned to look at the pile of books and devices that had been bestowed upon her—all of the information that she desired—and recognized it for what it was: temptation.

* * *

“Call me by my name.”

“Valeyard,” he breathed.

“Say it again.”

“Valeyard.” A beautiful arrangement of sounds, so different from her former name. _’Doctor’_ was a mouthful of teeth, a snarl of sharp consonants, and an open maw. That name was a shriek at the sky.

 _’Valeyard,’_ meanwhile, was a velvet caress of lips and tongue, something murmured in the dark, inhaled in a gasp, or teasingly traced upon the skin.

His own name was a hiss, coming to a sharp point like a tiny bite on the ear or fingertip, something with an edge but also a weight, a heaviness spoken in low tones, moaned in the back of the throat, forced out by desire or fear.

And the sound of it in her voice, whispering his name into his ear, was better than anything else he had ever felt in his entire fractured wreckage of a life: “Master.”

“Valeyard.” His lips took alternating shifts between saying her name and kissing her bare skin. He wasn’t sure which was the more intimate act.

_This is impossible._

He never got what he wanted—or never got it for very long—but here he was, pressed against the most precious thing in all of time and space: _her._

_This cannot be._

But it was. They had accomplished the impossible.

That glorious victory was then followed by a brilliant ouroboros: the Valeyard hatching the plan that led to her own genesis. Incredible. It was exactly the sort of plan that she alone was capable of devising, one which used the ripples and tides of causality to engineer the perfect trap from both the past and the present.

They were now the only two Time Lords: the sole survivors of the annihilation that they themselves had inflicted on their home. No, not their home— _this_ was home. _She_ was home. _They_ were home.

_At last, at last, at last…_

These brief indulgences in cozy corners of the TARDIS were as much of an individual exploration as a joint one. Bodies were puzzles even at the best of times, and regenerations (and, in his case, the occasional body-theft) compounded the problem: it was difficult to give directions while you yourself were still getting the lay of the land. Even alone and bored in the Outback, he hadn’t bothered to do much of that; given the life he’d led, it was easier to not get attached to any one body, because the odds were good that he would lose it in short order anyway. Furthermore, he’d spent so much of that life in various amounts of hurt and discomfort that he had forgotten it was possible to feel _good_ as opposed to just “not in pain.”

And this did feel _very_ good.

_At last…_

“So,” he asked abruptly at one point afterwards, “which one of us do you think it is?”

“What?”

“The Hybrid. The prophecy said that it would one day stand in the ruins of Gallifrey and destroy a billion _billion_ hearts to heal its own.” He grinned. “Haven’t we just done that? Well,” he amended, “for certain definitions of ‘just done.’” He glared at her. “I had to live through most of the twentieth century between then and now.”

She smirked. “Well, I did indicate that you would be extremely angry with me. And besides,” she added scornfully, _“Nazis?_ Really?”

“I had to escape from a bloody concentration camp because of you!” He could feel his anger, a primal snarling thing, pushing its way out of his chest—

And she pushed back with her own: their two wills meeting, almost slamming into one another, and then receding back to an equilibrium. 

Her eyes practically glowed. “Because of _you,_ more like,” she retorted. “You’re the one who decided to play with genocidal maniacs.”

“What are _we,_ if not genocidal maniacs?” he pointed out. “And you still haven’t answered my question.”

“Whether one of us is the Hybrid? Some kind of crossbreed between two ‘warrior races,’ destined to destroy Gallifrey at the end of time?”

“Perhaps it _is_ me,” he mused out loud. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t considered it before. “My DNA at this point probably resembles Swiss cheese, what with all the body swapping and other desperate acts of survival.”

She shook her head firmly. “It wouldn’t be that simple. _They_ all thought it was the offspring of Time Lords and Daleks—which, in addition to being a bit nauseating, is more of a tale to frighten children at night than anything plausible.”

“So you don’t think the prophecy’s real.”

“Oh, I absolutely believe that it’s real. It just isn’t fate, not the way that the Time Lords believed in it: _‘ooo, you’re the Hybrid! Time to go wreck everything because the prophecy says so!’”_ She laughed. “It’s like any of our titles: it’s a promise that you make, the story you tell about yourself. The Doctor wanted to save lives and hold power over life and death—meanwhile, _you_ want dominion over everything you can get—”

“And the Valeyard?”

“A prosecutor—you remember the first draft, don’t you?” The expression on her face implied that she wasn’t exactly impressed with the one that had tried to steal the Doctor’s regenerations back in the Hideous Coat days—besides, he thought indignantly, tampering with regenerations was _his_ trick. “Inflicting justice on those who deserve it, no matter what it takes. Judge, jury, and executioner.”

“With an emphasis on the ‘execution’ part,” he noted with relish. “But what does that have to do with the Hybrid?”

“It’s a promise too. Claiming the mantle of the Hybrid, it’s making a promise: to stand in the ruins of Gallifrey, to break a billion hearts—”

“A billion _billion_ hearts,” he corrected her.

She rolled her eyes fondly. “To break a billion _billion_ hearts to heal their own, to unravel the Web of Time—oh, feel like doing _that,_ by the way?”

“Not sure I could manage it on my own, Hybrid or not.”

She snorted. “Well, this is an odd moment of humility from you.”

“You’re rather good at humiliating me, after all,” he said, stroking her cheek.

“Oh, I haven’t even _begun_ to humiliate you,” she whispered, closing her eyes and leaning into his touch. “But you’re not the Hybrid.”

“Do you think it’s you, then?” he asked. “Something more metaphorical, like what I told you the last time we went to Skaro: ‘The friend in the enemy, the enemy in the friend.’ The Valeyard and the Doctor.”

“It’s not me either,” she said, opening her eyes again. “One last guess, but here’s a hint: the Hybrid isn’t necessarily one person.”

“We’re both Time Lords. Where’s the ‘crossbreed’ part of it?”

“But we’re not Time Lords,” she said, laying her hand over the one that he had on her cheek. He could feel their pulses pounding in an identical rhythm. “Not anymore.”

“Maybe we never were,” he said bitterly. “All of those lies about who we really were…”

That inferno of rage returned, against Gallifrey instead of the person in front of him. He wasn’t sure that it could even be contained by his own skin; it radiated out of him like light and heat from a star. The planet was already dead, already burned by their combined efforts, but the anger and betrayal remained, rising and falling with nowhere to go—

_Contact._

He inhaled sharply. _“That’s cheating,”_ he said, feeling her thoughts mixing with his, their fury combining into a force strong enough to destroy worlds, to destroy time itself—

 _“As I was saying,”_ she said, as though she were still speaking out loud, _“what would you think about giving the Web of Time a proper kick in the shins?”_

 _“You mean tear it to pieces?”_ He leaned forward so that he could rest his forehead against hers.

 _“Of course. What did you think I meant?”_ She kissed him. _“Nice that we can do this and talk at the same time, you know.”_

 _“Like we used to.”_ Those days, long ago, when they would run through the grass together, calling up to the sky and making plans for what they would do together on the day they finally left to see the whole of space and time, hand in hand.

Before they knew the truth. Before the grass burned to ash at their command. 

_“Like we always will,”_ she said. _“There’s no separating us now.”_

_“So what happens next?”_

He could feel the hum of her laughter on his lips as much as he could hear it in his mind. _“I’ve never known you to be without a massively overwrought scheme.”_ She pulled him closer. _“Tell me your most wicked plans.”_

_“And then you’ll, what, improve them?”_

_“Well, I’ve already got plenty of experience_ _ruining_ _your plans.”_


	2. Countdown: Twelve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Hey, it's getting mythical now_   
>  _Better pick your weapons up and throw your mercy down_
> 
> **Setting:** Series 8, Episode 12: "Death in Heaven"

_I killed him._

_He’s standing here and I killed him._

_He’s looking at me and I just killed him._

_Oh, Danny… what have I done?_

Clara knew exactly what she had done. In fact, the only thing her mind kept repeating was what she had done: looked a man she loved directly in the eyes, flipped a switch, and killed the last flicker of light that still existed inside of him.

One activated emotion inhibitor later, the corpse of Danny Pink was just that: a corpse encased in metal, awaiting orders from above.

 _Literally_ above, in fact, because there was Missy, descending from the clouds like a demented panto.

Somewhere, under the unending chorus of her own sins, Clara pieced together what she knew about this person: another Time Lord, someone who knew the Doctor well—very well—but who was also mad as a hatter.

Clara Oswald had once been scattered across the Doctor’s timeline like a handful of glitter. She knew enough to name the only candidate to fit that description: the Master. 

Which is why she continued to stand there numbly while Missy briefly threatened her before the Doctor intervened, why she barely paid attention to her own actions as she grabbed the disintegrator from where the Doctor had thrown it into the grass, why she merely stood next to the Cyberman who used to be Danny Pink and waited for whatever inevitable horror was about to happen.

Because Clara was nothing more than part of the audience now. She had played her role and then been shuffled off the stage. That was what the Master did: arrived and turned everything into a two-person show, a violent battle of wills that would, if Clara’s suspicions were correct, end with the Doctor’s ultimate victory at the cost of too many other lives.

But until then: the performance. The part of Clara that was still bothering to pay attention witnessed Missy order around the hundreds of Cybermen in the graveyard like they were puppets, remove the bracelet from her wrist, and belt out a rendition of “Happy Birthday” in a cringe-inducing imitation of Marilyn Monroe serenading JFK:

“Happy Birthday, _Mister President…”_ she crooned in the Doctor’s face, moving the bracelet towards his arm—

And then a pair of additional voices—a man and a woman, from the sound of it—merrily chimed in from atop a nearby tombstone: “Happy Birthday to _yoooooouuuuu!”_

The woman was a petite blonde wearing a t-shirt and blue trousers, with a tuxedo jacket hastily thrown over it. The slightly-scruffy brown-skinned man sitting beside her was in a dark purple coat and shirt with plaid trousers in a similar shade.

And they were both _applauding._

“I love this bit,” the man said.

“How many times have you seen this?” the woman asked him, taking a small paper bag out from one of her pockets.

“Well, right now, I’m also watching on a live feed from the Australian Outback.” He turned to wave at the roof of one of the crypts. “Hello, handsome!” he called.

Clara looked at the Doctor and Missy for any indication of what was going on right now, but they both looked even more bewildered than she felt. This was not part of either of their plans.

“Don’t mind us,” the woman told them with a grin. “Carry on. Put the bracelet on him, tell him he’s the proud new papa of an army of the undead, and then let the sparks fly.”

“Or you could cut to the chase and just snog each other silly,” the man added.

“Again.”

“Again,” he concurred. “We all know you want to.”

“It’s up to you, though. Oh!” the woman asked, as though realising something. “Do you need a line prompt?” She nudged the man next to her. “Go on, it’s mostly Missy monologing anyway.”

He scratched his cheek for a moment as if searching his memory. “Let’s see… something something, insult the eyebrows, then… ah, yes, I’ve got it now.” He spoke the next part as though he were reciting a quote: “Armies are for people who think they’re right, and no one thinks they’re righter than you! Give a good man firepower and he’ll never run out of people to kill!”

The woman adopted a version of the Doctor’s Scottish accent: “I don’t want an army!”

“That’s the trouble! Yes, you _do!”_ the man retorted in a voice that Clara now recognized as an imitation of Missy. “You’ve always wanted one! All those people suffering in the Dalek camps? Now you can save them! All those bad guys winning all the wars? Go and get the good guys back!”

Missy finally managed to speak for herself: “How do you know all of this?” she snarled.

“How do you _think_ I know?” the man replied, looking extremely smug.

The blonde picked up where he left off, addressing Missy as well. “You and Saxon turned on one another: you stabbed him in the back and then he shot you as you were turning to go—or so I’ve been told. I wasn’t there.” She pointed at the man beside her. “But he was there. The _only_ one there, in fact.”

Another regeneration of the Master, Clara realised. She looked at the Doctor and saw that he was rooted to the ground in horror.

“That doesn’t explain what you're doing here,” Missy snapped.

“Moving things along,” the woman replied. “To sum up,” she pointed at Missy, _“she_ wants to take the Doctor out on a date but her only ideas involve galactic conquest—”

“Which is a perfectly reasonable activity for a date!” the Master protested.

“Meanwhile,” she said, indicating the Doctor, _“he_ is feeling overwhelmed and, to be honest, a bit queasy at this rather tasteless attempt at a romantic gesture.”

The Master continued to object. “They were all just rotting in the ground! No one was using them for anything.”

“Still tasteless!”

“It’s basically taxidermy, only there’s a winner!”

The woman shoved the paper bag she was holding onto his hands. “Eat a jelly baby and hush for a moment.”

Who was she? Another time traveller, most likely—someone like Lucy Saxon, perhaps? A human that the Master had brought along in an imitation of the Doctor’s penchant for travelling with a companion? They certainly seemed cozy with one another.

Then why did it seem like she was the one in charge?

And why did she seem so familiar?

She moved across the graveyard at a pace best described as a saunter, maneuvering around Cybermen and tombstones alike. She was about halfway between where the Doctor and Missy were and where Clara herself stood, when she stopped and looked around as if taking a headcount.

“All right,” the blonde woman said, “so you’re at an impasse: Missy wants to give the Doctor an army and is willing to kill everyone else on Earth in order to get him to take it, and the Doctor doesn’t want either of those things, obviously.”

Until that point, the Doctor’s eyes had been fixed on the Master; however, they were now shifting towards this woman with an expression that indicated he was trying to calculate roughly two hundred different hypothetical scenarios at once. “What’s your plan?” he asked.

“Brilliant question,” she replied approvingly, linking her hands behind her back. “Always ask for the plan, no one can resist a good brag. Since neither of _you_ want an army, _we’re_ going to take it off your hands.”

“Absolutely not,” Missy retorted, reflexively clutching the bracelet to her chest. “Who are you, anyway: Time Vortex Barbie?”

Rather than looking insulted, the woman beamed. _“Fantastic_ question. But I’ve got an even better one.” She brought her hands out from behind her back, now holding a small paper bag. “If I handed him the bag of jelly babies, then where did _these_ come from?”

The Master’s image suddenly flickered and vanished. 

“Hello, gorgeous,” came a voice from behind the tombstone closest to Missy.

They were wearing the same color coats, Clara noticed, as the Master tackled his earlier incarnation to the ground.

Keeping the bracelet out of his reach, Missy yelled into it: “Cyberdarlings, be a dear and _swat these flies_ for mummy, will you?”

The air filled with blue bolts of energy.

Metal hands shoved Clara forward, through a narrow path between tombstones, until they were in the shade of a crypt a little larger than the TARDIS. She turned, astonished, to find the Cyberman with Danny’s face still beside her. 

“Take cover,” he said, beginning to fire on the other Cybermen in the vicinity. 

His voice was still flat and emotionless, as was his expression, but… was he still in there? Or was this just a bit of faulty code, a corrupted subroutine that kept him repeating the sort of thing that Danny would have done—

 _The sort of thing that Danny would_ _do_ _…_

No, this wasn’t the time for crying. Crying would come later. She looked around for the familiar black coat and gray hair of the Doctor, and saw him duck behind a garish statue of an angel with its hands over its face. “Clara!” he shouted.

“I’m all right!” she called back. 

She could faintly hear the Master’s voice from where he was still wrestling with Missy. “You know, you would have found this _really funny_ the next time you went to a Mondasian colony ship.”

“Don’t need to, dear,” Missy said, planting a boot in his stomach. “I’ve already got all the Cybermen I need.”

“You’d be surprised,” he wheezed.

The Doctor was fine for the moment, the Masters were occupied with one another, which left…

There she was: sitting behind a nearby tombstone, looking at Clara with a curious expression.

“Take cover,” Danny _(was it Danny?)_ repeated.

“Not yet,” Clara said, marching in the direction of this agent of chaos.

“You’re lucky you’re so short,” the woman said when Clara got close enough to hear her. “They’d have taken your head off otherwise.”

Clara stood over her, aiming Missy’s disintegrator at her. “Tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you.”

“Perhaps you should,” the blonde replied, gazing up at her fondly. “I wouldn’t blame you. I wouldn’t even mind.”

“What, you’d just let me?” Clara scoffed.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Oh, Clara,” she said softly, still looking at her with such tenderness, “do you still think I care for you so little that this would make a difference?”

The entire universe seemed to narrow down to Clara and the person in front of her. She could hear her own blood pounding in her ears. “Doctor?” she whispered.

The woman reached up and placed a hand on hers. “Hello, Clara.”

“You’re the Doctor?” she whispered again, trying to make sense of any of this. She lowered the weapon.

“At one point, yes.”

“What do you mean?”

“I _was_ the Doctor. I _am_ the Valeyard.” She slowly got to her feet and headed in the direction of the crypt.

Clara knew that term. Buried somewhere in the fragments of her memory: a trial of a Time Lord, manipulated by a sinister prosecutor who was a dark reflection of the Doctor’s worst outcomes…

And here was one of those outcomes, apparently.

“How did you break the promise?” Clara demanded as they took cover between the wall of the crypt and Danny _(was it Danny?)_.

“What do you mean?” the Valeyard asked warily.

“The name of the Doctor is a promise,” Clara reminded her, hearing herself growing louder with every word. _“You_ told me that. You said that the one from the war wasn’t called the Doctor because he broke the promise. _What did you do?”_

“I didn’t break a promise!” the Valeyard snapped, the first hint of anger showing on her face. _“They did._ The Time Lords did—they broke every promise they ever made. So I made a new one!”

“And you joined the _Master?_ That doesn’t strike you as, I don’t know, a little bit villainous?” She cast a withering glare in his direction. “Or did he somehow turn good?”

“This isn’t Star Wars,” the Master scoffed, grabbing a handful of Missy’s hair. “There’s not a Dark Si—ow!” he yelped as she jabbed a finger in his eye.

Clara then looked at the Doctor— _her_ Doctor, the _real_ Doctor—who was running in their direction but having to dodge lasers on the way. “This… this army,” she said, turning back to the Valeyard. “Does he take it? Is that how he becomes you?”

The woman who had once been the Doctor shook her head, looking amused. “No. He gives a nice little speech and then all hell breaks loose.” She then looked over at Danny, who was still providing cover fire. “P.E., that’s where you come in. You need to get Clara away from here and keep her safe.”

Clara felt her mouth going dry. “You’re changing history.” That explained some things: recently, she noticed the presence of technology that was too advanced for the early 21st century popping up everywhere.

“Of course I am: I’m _fixing_ it. I can _do_ that,” the Valeyard said, sounding a little impatient. “Why else would I be here, crossing my own timeline?”

“If you remember what you said to me at the volcano then you remember the _other_ thing you told me there,” Clara snapped. “You said that if you changed the events that brought me there, it would create a paradox. Which is exactly what you’re doing now: trying to change the events that brought you here to change them. You’ll disintegrate your whole timeline.”

The Valeyard smiled sadly. “Oh, Clara, I love how clever you are… but you don’t need to worry about this one. I came prepared.”

“If you’re here with the Master, then obviously you’ve got more than a few wires crossed. I don’t care if you destroy yourself.” She gestured at the Doctor. “But I won’t let you destroy _him.”_

Her fingers tightened on the disintegrator.

“Have you checked your hand recently?” the Valeyard asked.

“Have I—” Clara blinked, then looked at the object she was wielding.

In place of the disintegrator was a red jelly baby. 

Clara turned her hand over and saw the patch on the back of her hand—the one that had induced a dream state only a day ago when she threatened the Doctor at the volcano.

“I wasn't sure you’d fall for it again,” the Valeyard said softly, pulling the real disintegrator out of her coat pocket. “I’m sorry, Clara, I really am, but there are things that need to change.” She held what was apparently the latest version of the sonic screwdriver in her other hand and pointed it at the weapon, apparently modifying it in some way. 

“Clara, get away from her!” the Doctor cried, finally getting within range.

“I’m sorry,” the Valeyard said to her past self. “I’m so sorry.”

She fired the disintegrator.

The Doctor vanished. 

Clara screamed.

 _Twice in one day,_ _twice in one day_ _, I lost a person I loved._

_This one’s my fault too: I shouldn’t have fallen for that trick again, I should have known—_

Heedless of any danger to herself, Clara flung herself at her friend’s murderer.

The Valeyard stumbled but managed to escape her grasp. “Come on, P.E.,” she said to Danny. She actually had the nerve to look _sad._ “Please get her out of here. We’re going to stop Missy, we’re going to fix what she did—the rain isn’t going to fall—but Clara can’t be here for this.”

 _“You killed the Doctor!”_ Clara screamed. “Don’t you _dare_ pretend to care about my well-being!”

“I didn’t kill him!” the Valeyard hissed, looking over her shoulder to where the Master was apparently succeeding in wrestling the control bracelet out of his younger self’s hand.

“I forgot how _bitey_ you were,” he groaned, panting with exhaustion as he climbed to his feet. “Hands on heads, everyone!” he shouted into the control bracelet. The Cybermen stopped firing their weapons and complied, turning the graveyard into what looked like a surreal hostage situation.

“We have the same plan, you know,” Missy said, sitting up and glaring at him. “I don’t understand why you’re going to all this trouble.”

The Master twirled the bracelet around his finger. “Well, here’s the difference between you and me: _he_ was never going to take it. You knew that. All you wanted was his attention while you confessed how much you missed him.” He grinned at the Valeyard, who was now several steps ahead of Clara and closing in. _“She,_ on the other hand… Ready, love?”

At the same time he tossed the Valeyard the bracelet, she tossed him the disintegrator.

He caught it and turned back to look at Missy. “Birthday gift for the missus—you know how it is.” He laughed in delight. “Except that you _don’t_ know, because I got the one thing you never got, the thing that none of us got… until me.”

“The Doctor,” Missy said quietly, almost wistfully.

“And all it took was the worst betrayal imaginable.” He aimed the disintegrator at her. “Now say something nice.”

“Give her a kiss for me,” Missy murmured.

The Master laughed again and fired.

She vanished.

“Well, you look a mess,” the Valeyard said, examining the Master. She was right: the vest and shirt under his coat had been nearly torn to pieces, his hand and nose were both bleeding, and he was inexplicably missing a shoe. “Remember when you used to fight clean?”

“I never fought clean,” he said with a snort. 

“What about that sword fight we had in the ‘70s?”

“The one where you stole my sandwich?”

The Valeyard crossed her arms over her chest and looked incredulous. “Are you _still_ upset over that sandwich?”

He appeared to ignore the question. “So where did you send them?” he asked.

“Not far: just a cozy little cottage.”

The Master raised an eyebrow. “A cottage?”

“On Pluto,” she added.

“Ouch, not even a proper planet.”

“And there’s only one bed.” She looked at Clara. “See? Not dead. Just banished.”

“Why?” Clara demanded. “Why did you do that?”

“Because we needed them out of the way for a little bit. Don’t worry,” the Valeyard reassured her, “they’ll get out of there eventually, but by then it’ll be too late.”

“You all travel through _time,”_ Clara pointed out. “Calling something _‘too late’_ is a bit meaningless, isn’t it?”

“Not if they don’t have a TARDIS,” the Master countered. He looked up at the sky. “Tut tut, it looks like rain, doesn’t it?”

“You _did_ put in a failsafe, didn’t you?” the Valeyard asked. 

“Do you really believe I have so little regard for my own survival that I wouldn’t include a way to reverse my Evil Scheme?”

The Valeyard rolled her eyes. “Why yes, I _do_ believe that you have so little regard for your own survival and furthermore, _yes,_ I also believe that you would lie to me about it because you think it’s funny. So do you have a way to reverse it or not?” She indicated the bracelet she was holding. “Because we both know that I do, but it would make the whole trip pointless.”

Rather than snipe back at her, the Master’s expression grew serious… almost lost. “You can trust me. You… you know that, don’t you?”

The sincerity in his voice was quite possibly the most unsettling thing Clara had ever heard in her life. 

Even the Valeyard looked a little stunned. “I… yes. I do trust you, it’s just…” She shifted uncomfortably and then said hastily: “We’re running out of time.”

On the horizon, Clara could hear the roar of jet engines. “They know you’re here,” she said. “Every world power with a gun is heading your way.”

“Which is why it’s time for you to go,” the Valeyard said, appearing to suddenly remember that Clara was there. She then looked past her to where Danny was standing. “P.E.—”

“His name is Danny!” Clara snapped. She didn’t mind the nickname when the Doctor was saying it, but she would be _damned_ if she was going to let this person use it.

The Valeyard flinched. “Danny Pink,” she said quietly, “this whole square kilometer is about to be turned into a smoking crater. I know you care for her. I—oh!” She held out the sonic screwdriver. Behind her, Danny let out a cry of pain. “Switched the inhibitor off again. It was a dirty move on my past self’s part to force you to turn it on. I’m sorry.”

“Clara…” Danny gasped as she turned to face him. 

“Now _go,”_ the Valeyard said.

“What’s the point?” Clara shouted. “You’ve got that control bracelet. You’ll just order him to join your horrid ‘army’ in a moment anyway.”

“Oh, Clara,” the Valeyard said, continuing to gaze at Danny instead of at her, “remember all the orders that Missy gave? He never followed a single one.” She looked up at the sky. “We’re out of time. Go!”

Before Clara could do anything else, before she could tell the Valeyard the depths of the betrayal and pain she was experiencing, metal arms grabbed her around the waist and the ground receded below her as Danny took off into the sky.

* * *

The Master had inhaled so much smoke that it was a wonder he wasn’t coughing up clouds of it. Their escape had been closer than expected: enough that, for a moment, he thought that they might both end up dying there, blasted into ashes by a bunch of humans wielding primitive explosives.

But they were alive. They made it out by the skin of their teeth and at the cost of a few hundred destroyed Cybermen, but they were alive and the rest of the army was in storage for when they would be needed.

And they had a second TARDIS, which was probably the bigger prize. Armies were far easier to come by than a working TARDIS.

Well, for certain definitions of “working.”

“This is the second time I’m doing some of these repairs, you know,” he grumbled, hip-deep in the TARDIS’s engines.

“Because this TARDIS is from the point in time before Missy worked on it, so those repairs haven’t happened yet,” the Valeyard called down from the upper deck. “That’s how causality _works.”_

He snorted in derision. “For now.” That _was_ why they were busy working on this TARDIS, after all.

“For now,” she conceded. “I have to flood the temporal transformer conduits, so brace yourself: it’s about to get very loud up here.”

Even with the advanced notice, he still winced at the roar of a mixture of artron energy and compressed space dust moving at just under the speed of sound.

 _“Contact.”_ It was her voice inside his mind.

 _“Remember when this used to be a Very Big Deal instead of just an alternative to texting?”_ he couldn’t help asking.

_“We did this all the time when we were younger.”_

_“When we were friends,”_ he added bitterly.

There was a brief silence. _“What happened back there?”_ she asked.

 _“With the failsafe?”_ He wasn’t sure if he really wanted to talk about this right now, especially with them in the other’s thoughts like this. It was harder to avoid things when it felt like she was pressed up against him and whispering in his ear.

_“Yes. You seemed genuinely bothered, as opposed to your usual Ranty Homicidal bothered.”_

That had been an unexpected feeling, one that he was still trying to puzzle out. 

_“Were you worried that we would turn on each other again?”_ she asked.

 _“Were_ _you_ _?”_ he countered. _“You’re the one who thought I would have let it rain Cyberpollen even though I promised you that I would keep the human casualties to a minimum.”_ Which, in his opinion, was a rather massive concession on his part. Of course, he thought as he looked at the engines, not as massive a concession as the one she made.

 _“Old habits, I suppose,”_ she admitted. _“You yelling ‘hands on heads’ brought back a few memories of the Adelaide Gallery. And it was hard seeing Missy again: she killed a lot of people during that particular scheme, more out of cruelty than anything else.”_

_“We could go save some of them, if you wanted. Scarf Girl and, what’s her name, Kate… wait, she survived, didn’t she? How did that happen?”_

_“Her father. Even converted, he went to save her, like Danny saved Clara.”_

_“Was he the one who shot me?”_ he asked. He knew that the blast that Missy took during the original sequence of events hadn’t come from the Doctor.

_“Well, you know he’d been longing to do that to you for decades. Didn’t even need five rounds this time.”_

He scratched his chin in thought. _“You know, I never figured out why that Danny one didn’t follow orders.”_

 _“There are things more powerful than orders or programming. There are promises that live deeper than thoughts or emotions. Love’s one of them.”_ He fought back an involuntary twitch as she moved deeper into his mind. _“There will always be renegades: others out there too, not obeying, taking care of the ones they love,”_ she continued. _“That was the trouble with Missy’s plan: she thought that everyone would choose to delete their emotions if given the opportunity. Because_ _you_ _would have, if you had the chance, wouldn’t you?”_

It was like dragging a finger over a wound that was only half-healed. She was getting too close to something that he’d rather avoid at the moment. 

_“When it comes to emotions, pain is a gift,”_ she whispered.

 _“And you are so very generous,”_ he snapped, cutting the connection and resuming his work on the engines.

After a few minutes, the noise of the flooded conduits ceased and she stood over the hatchway to where he was working.

“It’s very off-putting when you sulk, you know,” she said.

“Even if you’re relieved to not be ordering the old Brigadier around, some of those Cybermen we just packed away probably used to be friends of yours.” He sneered up at her. “Feeling squeamish yet?”

“It’s going to be a very long trip if you keep looking for ways to upset me,” she pointed out wearily.

“Likewise.”

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, sitting down and dangling her feet inside the hatch. “The problem isn’t that we don’t trust each other.”

“There are a whole _host_ of problems aside from that. You’ll have to narrow it down a bit.”

“The problem is that we don’t trust _ourselves._ I can’t entirely reassure myself that I won’t make some kind of impulsive decision and ruin the whole plan by forgetting the big picture. I imagine that you can’t entirely reassure yourself that you won’t give in to your compulsive need to break something out of boredom.”

“Or fall into our old dynamic,” he agreed grimly.

“Trying to outmaneuver one another—”

“Destroy one another, you mean.”

“Whatever you want to call it—it wasn’t pleasant, but it was familiar. Almost comfortable.”

He shrugged. “I suppose we just have to remind ourselves that there are things out there that we despise more than one another.”

“Or that there are things we care about more than feeling comfortable.” After a pause, she added, “or people we care more about.”

She wasn’t even inside his head and she was cornering him in his own thoughts again. 

“If you want to be helpful,” he said, feeling extremely uneven, “come down here and hold up this access panel.”

She jumped down. “How about I just hold you?” she suggested quietly. “You look like you could use it.”

Before he could come up with a good retort, they were in one another’s arms and he felt something inside of him give way.

Everything in his life would have been so much simpler if he hadn’t been drowning in all of these feelings, making him both powerful and _so weak_ all at once.

But if he hadn’t been forced to endure them, he would still be on Gallifrey, doing as he was told instead of getting distracted by the Academy classmate whose presence burned in his hearts like the center of a star.

Much to his annoyance, he realised she was right: there will always be renegades.


	3. Countdown: Eleven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _We’re trying to get to the end of it_   
>  _But ending up at the start_   
>  _And every time we begin again_   
>  _We remember why we are where we are_   
>  _But we’re gonna fight it_   
>  _So let’s have one last round_   
>  _And if it’s not forever_   
>  _Well then it’s just for right now_
> 
> **Setting:** Series 5, Episode 12: “The Pandorica Opens”

The Valeyard was being annoyingly chipper, which was all the more irritating since they were currently communicating telepathically and therefore he could _feel_ it as well as hear it.

 _“Anti-plastic is deployed!”_ she announced. _“Didn’t even need gymnastics this time.”_

The Master sighed. _“Should I even ask?”_

_“To be fair, the gymnastics weren’t mine.”_

_“More clever pet tricks?”_ he asked sourly.

 _“You know, you sound a bit cross,”_ she said. _“Have you considered a nap?”_

_“Of course I’m cross! I’ve been stuck in this thing for two weeks ever since you shoved me in!”_

_“I also shoved you into the Kasaavin’s dimension for who knows how long, and you didn’t complain about that.”_

_“I_ _did_ _complain about that!”_

_“I also locked you in a vault under St. Luke’s University, dropped you into the heart of my TARDIS, trapped you on a ship with the Rani and a dinosaur, sent you to a UNIT prison, and left you to the mercy of every species, army, or faction you ever tried to double-cross. And that’s just the short list.”_

_“And yet you’re surprised that I wanted to kill you,”_ he grumbled.

 _“Oh, not surprised at all,”_ she said breezily. _“At this point, most people want to kill me.”_

_“Except for your precious pets.”_

_“Even with them, I’d give 50/50 odds.”_

She sounded wistful, which was _extremely_ irritating. _“Speaking of your pets, are they here yet?”_ he asked.

_“They’ve been here for a bit, actually, but I can’t do anything until she gets back in the TARDIS and leaves.”_

_“What about the other two?”_

_“They might be a bit faster this time around, since we—”_

_“You,”_ he interjected.

 _“—since_ _I_ _wiped the assimilation programming. They should be able to just walk through to the chamber and—oh. Oh dear.”_

 _“Please tell me that you didn’t just ruin the entire plan,”_ he groaned. If he had spent two whole weeks in this thing for nothing… 

_“No, no, no,”_ she hastened to assure him. _“I forgot to deactivate the dart thingy. It knocked her right out. She’ll be fine, I just feel bad.”_

He rolled his eyes. She was still so _sentimental_ about her pets.

_“And… there we go. I’ve started the unlocking mechanism. You’ll be out of there shortly, so get ready.”_

_“Finally.”_

_“I have to leave now, so you’ll be on your own. Good luck.”_

_“I can’t hear a thing in here, you know. Not unless he starts shouting.”_ He paused as he realised the absurdity of what he just said. _“…of course he’s going to start shouting.”_

 _“Just wait for the monologue. You’ll know when to take your cue.”_ She severed the connection.

He really, _really_ hated waiting. Especially when he was alone.

He realised that he hadn’t been alone for quite a while now. He’d gotten used to having her around. Even during the last two weeks, she was in and out of his head as she busied herself with preparations for what she kept cheekily calling a “heist.”

So he, as usual, spent his period of solitude both missing her and plotting revenge.

He could hear a voice outside, very faint: “…all here, all of them, all for you. What could you possibly be?”

It didn’t sound like a monologue, more like the Doctor muttering to himself, but if the Master could hear him it meant that he was close… very close.

And then he wasn’t. The Master grit his teeth impatiently and went back to waiting in silence.

Only a moment later, though, he heard a familiar voice, amplified to a massive degree. “Hello, Stonehenge!” the Doctor shouted as though he was taking the stage at an arena show. “Who takes the Pandorica, takes the universe—but bad news, everyone, because guess who? Ha!”

He listened to the Doctor continue to monologue—disjointedly ramble, more like it, playing the fool as usual… but there was no hiding the boast in his voice:

“Come on! Look at me. No plan, no back up, no weapons worth a damn. Oh, and something else: I don’t have anything to lose!”

_Will this damn thing ever finish unlocking?_

“—got any plans on taking the Pandorica tonight, just remember who’s standing in your way.” 

He couldn’t help smiling a little. Now _there_ was the dangerous man hiding behind the fool.

“Remember every black day I ever stopped you, and then, and then… do the smart thing: let somebody else try first.”

_And there’s my cue._

As the last section of the doors opened, the Master readied his brightest smile.

“How about I have a go?” He stepped out of the Pandorica. “I think the odds would be in my favor.”

_At least she didn’t strap me in… that would have ruined the entrance somewhat._

The Doctor stared at him for a moment, then frowned in confusion. “Aren’t you the chap I met at MI6 about eight months back?”

“Good memory, top marks.” He leaned casually against the open door of the Pandorica, hoping that he looked at least a little impressive despite the muscles in his legs and back screaming in protest after two weeks in what was essentially a very complicated coffin.

“Code name O, wasn’t it?” He hadn’t put it together yet, apparently. “What are you doing under Stonehenge?”

“You wouldn’t answer your texts.” He tapped the door with a finger. Four beats, slightly syncopated.

The Doctor still hadn’t caught on. “Who _are_ you?”

“Oh, you know me.” He felt his grin widen. “I’m a _master_ of disguise.”

_Come on, come on, say it, say the thing—_

“Oh…” the Doctor gasped in realisation.

He burst into giggles. “That’s why I picked the name!”

“…of course _you’d_ be the one they built the Pandorica to imprison,” the Doctor finished.

The Master let out an exhale of annoyance. _Ruined it. Utterly ruined it._ Before he could reply, however, a tall redhead entered the chamber looking disoriented.

“Oh, my head…” she complained, then stared at him. “Hang on, that’s not the usual Roman uniform.”

“Well, I had to dress up for such a momentous occasion, after all.” He was rather pleased that he had a chance to take the tuxedo out for another spin. “Hi, I’m the Master. What do you think of my bowtie?”

The girl—presumably Amy Pond—looked to the Doctor for answers. “What’s going on?”

The Doctor was still staring at him in horror, although his reply was to the girl. “Remember when I told you about the creature soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies?”

Amy’s expression grew skeptical as she looked the Master over. “A bloke in a suit?”

He couldn’t help scoffing. _“He’s_ a bloke in a suit too,” he said, gesturing at the Doctor, “and it’s not like _he’s_ harmless.”

“And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it,” the Doctor continued, his voice getting louder and more agitated. “One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world.”

The Master gave a snort of laughter. “On a point of information, I have in fact been stopped, held, _and_ reasoned with— _especially_ the held part—by _you._ Though I will cop to the ‘tearing down your world’ bit.” He made a show of picking an imaginary piece of lint off of his lapel. “But all of those qualities apply to you as much as they do to me.”

“Did I put you in there?” the Doctor demanded.

He smirked. “In a way.”

Amy had apparently had enough. “If you boys are done with the mysterious posturing, could one of you explain what is going on here?”

“He’s another Time Lord,” the Doctor said.

“I thought you said that they were all gone.”

“I also used to be Prime Minister,” the Master pointed out with glee. “Did you happen to vote for Harold Saxon, by any chance?”

“Yes, but he seemed like a bit of a prick,” Amy said.

“You have _no idea,”_ he sighed. He couldn’t wait for his encounter with _that_ regeneration; he had more than a few grudges to settle with him.

“You threw yourself into the rift to stop the return of the Time War,” the Doctor insisted. “How did you survive?”

He laughed in disbelief. “Really? _That’s_ your question? Have I _ever,_ in the centuries we’ve known one another, provided an explanation that was even remotely satisfying?”

“Half of them weren’t even _coherent,”_ the Doctor conceded. His expression hardened. “The cracks in the universe—that’s your doing, isn't it? That’s how you came back.”

The Master rolled his eyes. “I thought you were supposed to be the _fun_ one.”

“Only to my friends,” the Doctor replied coldly.

Unexpectedly, that stung a little. “Believe it or not, we _are_ friends in my time. Which is why I’m here: as I’m sure you’ve noticed, there’s an army of _everyone_ about to descend on your head because they think _you’re_ the one responsible for the TARDIS exploding and ruining everyone’s day.”

“But instead, that was you, right?” Amy asked. He had to admit: he enjoyed her accent—it brought back memories of Mister Grumpy Eyebrows.

“No, shockingly, I had nothing to do with it. In fact, the whole reason why I’m here is to help _stop_ it.” He held out his hands in a _tada!_ gesture. “I’m a hero! Who would have thought?”

“The TARDIS isn’t here,” the Doctor said.

“Guess you missed that while you were busy being a birthday present,” Amy added drily.

“That’s not the bit I’m here to help with,” the Master replied. “I’m here to help with that lot up there. Speaking of birthday presents…” He rolled up his sleeve with a grin. “This is where the fun begins.” In the most over-the-top American drawl he could manage, he shouted into the Cyber control bracelet: “All right, boys: sic ‘em!”

The noise that ensued was _fantastic._ Music to his ears… and most of the really good stuff he couldn’t even hear due to it taking place outside of Earth’s atmosphere.

He followed the Doctor as he ran out of the chamber to look at the sky.

Which was on fire.

_Maximum carnage._

“What did you bring here?” the Doctor demanded, almost snarling. To be fair, the last thing the Master had unleashed on Earth in this Doctor’s memory was the Toclafane, so it probably wasn’t all that surprising that he was upset.

“Army of zombie Cybermen,” he said proudly. “Don’t worry: they were dead long before we got them.”

“You brought _Cybermen_ with you?”

“The original flavour was already up _there,”_ the Master protested, “and a few down here as well. Took care of those, by the way—and all the Autons masquerading as Romans.” He sniffed. “Don’t everybody thank me at once.” Technically, it was the Valeyard who had chucked the vial of anti-plastic into the Nestene Consciousness’s hidey-hole, but this Doctor didn’t have to know about that.

“Why are you doing this?” the Doctor asked faintly.

“Other than the fact that the universe is about to collapse and I’m a big fan of staying alive?” He looked at the Doctor and saw an expression on the man’s face that he didn’t anticipate: 

Hope.

Which is why the Master found himself saying, without any of his earlier scorn: “For you.”

_It’s always you._

This one had been so friendly, so enthusiastic, when they met while the Master was undercover at MI6. Even though he never seemed to look directly at any one thing for more than a few minutes, this Doctor always gave off the impression that he liked what he saw. At the time of that introduction, it had been a very long time since any version of the Doctor had looked at him with an expression devoid of suspicion.

But there wasn’t time to pine right now. “Any more questions?” he asked.

“What were you doing in there to begin with?” the Doctor asked, gesturing at the Pandorica.

“The whole area’s time-locked now.” Which wasn’t actually true at the moment—it _would_ be, after the Valeyard came to fetch him—but why would he tell the Doctor that? “I needed to find a way in, and this seemed like a solid enough plan.”

“Was it, though?” Amy asked, raising an eyebrow.

Oh, he _liked_ this one. “Not really, but someone thought it would be funny to chuck me in.” He flung out his arms again. “Last call for questions!”

Amy’s reply was immediate. “Who’s the other one?”

The Doctor looked at her. “Other one?” Apparently he hadn’t caught on to this bit either.

“When he talked about the Cybermen, he said that they were dead before ‘we’ got them," Amy explained, “and someone apparently locked him inside the Pandorica as a joke. Who are they?”

He grinned at Amy for a moment, and then shifted his gaze to the Doctor. “Come on, Doctor, this is an easy one.”

“Me,” he answered, looking resigned. “A future version of me.”

Well, he didn’t have to sound so _glum_ about it. “I told you that we were friends, remember?”

The Doctor was silent for a moment. “I can _maybe_ see a scenario where we would team up to stop the end of the universe, even though I’m sure you have a double-cross up your sleeve somewhere—”

“Especially since the tux makes you look a bit _‘abracadabra,’”_ Amy quipped.

“—but using an army of _Cybermen?”_ the Doctor finished, incredulous. “That’s stretching it a bit far.”

“We swiped it from further up your timeline. No one _there_ was using it.”

But the Doctor’s expression was resolute. “I would never do that.”

“Things change.” The Master smiled. “Doctor, in the future you’re going to find yourself doing all sorts of things you never thought you’d do. Such as this—”

He had been slowly inching in the Doctor’s direction throughout the conversation, which meant that he was now in close enough range to grab the man by his silly tweed lapels and kiss him.

And deliver a gift.

He shut his eyes against the brilliant yellow light, letting the energy move through both of them. The Doctor had initially grabbed his wrists and gone a bit stiff with shock, but abruptly something changed: his lips softened and he bent down a little bit to make the height difference less of an issue.

_Oh._

He hadn’t quite expected that part.

Well, he might as well enjoy it.

However, when they parted a moment later, the Doctor was actually _shaking._ “What was that?” he whispered, letting go of his wrists.

The Master released the lapels. “New cycle of regenerations. You’re welcome.”

“You can’t.”

“Just did. Though you were a little distracted at the time, by the looks of it.” He leaned back in so that their faces were only centimeters apart. “Fancy another go?”

“No, I mean you _actually can’t._ Not unless you gave up some regenerations of your own,” the Doctor said, backing away, “and I can’t see you doing _that.”_

“If the High Council can dole out new cycles to good little Time Lords and Ladies, then why can’t I?” he sneered. His anger was rising—this Doctor still thought that there was something about Gallifrey worth saving, this one was a _fool—_ “Especially since I was _there:_ it’s amazing what you can get away with stealing when everything’s on fire.”

“I could really do with another round of explanations, boys,” Amy said, looking at the two of them like they had sprouted extra heads.

He could see the Doctor struggle to not be distracted, but the compulsion to explain—show off, more accurately—won out. “Time Lords can regenerate their bodies a limited number of times. There were certain Time Lords, however, who had the authority to extend that limit.” He trembled slightly. “But they’re gone.”

The Master tried not to beam with pride, but found himself failing. _You’re welcome._ “Then aren’t you lucky that I happened along now, when you’re on your last one?”

“How many times have you regenerated?” Amy asked the Doctor, looking more concerned than anything else.

“That doesn’t matter,” the Doctor said quietly.

The Master ticked them off on his fingers as he recited: “Original, Pocket-Sized, Sandwich-Stealing Fop, Teeth & Curls, Dumb Blond with the Celery, Hideous Coat, Terrible Hat, the Pretty One, the Grandad No One Invites to Christmas Dinner, Leather Jacket, Specs & Sandshoes, and finally Bowtie over here. Oh, and there was a thing that happened with a hand that I missed due to being dead at the time.”

“Dead?” Amy repeated.

“You’re still upset over the sandwich?” the Doctor asked incredulously.

“I am not upset!” he snapped, realising that by saying those words he had only succeeded in sounding upset.

_Matter at hand, stick to the matter at hand…_

“Does it normally pass by kissing?” Amy asked, arching an eyebrow.

“No, that part was just for fun,” he replied with a leer.

“After _centuries_ of trying to kill me and/or steal my remaining regenerations, why would you show up and _give_ me a new set?” the Doctor demanded. “What’s the catch?”

“There is no catch! I’m just a bit impatient for your future self to show up, and since the events were altered that led to you getting your new cycle to begin with, we needed to find another way to get them to you—”

He didn’t think it was possible for this Doctor to get more pale, and yet he somehow managed it. “You’re changing history.”

 _“Fixing_ it,” he insisted, grudgingly sticking to the Valeyard’s term for it. “Besides, there’s not even much history _left_ at the moment, is there? The stars are going out and the cracks are eating everything and if you don’t start thinking of a way to say _thank you_ I am going to shove that stupid bowtie down your throat!”

“I know this isn’t some mercy mission for you,” the Doctor retorted. “Your motives are never that simple: you show up looking innocent and then you trip yourself up with half a dozen plans to conquer the universe, or destroy it, or pitch me into a rubbish bin—”

“Do you remember the Death Zone?” the Master snarled. “That lovely _game_ that Borusa forced you into playing?”

Amy snorted. “What sort of melodramatic weirdo names something a ‘Death Zone’?”

“Rassilon,” they both replied automatically.

“Not really an answer, you two,” she pointed out.

“I found you there: you and your stupid car and your stupid pet,” the Master continued, deciding that the plan could sod off for a moment while he got this particular grievance off of his chest, “and told you that the High Council had sent me to help you—well, guess what, _Doctor? They did!_ I wasn’t lying for once in my life and you stole my transmat device and left me for dead!”

“You really think that you deserve the benefit of the doubt, after all you’ve done?” The Doctor was reaching a fever-pitch of indignance. “If I recall, you ended up allying with the Cybermen not ten minutes later!”

“To save my own life!” He was beginning to wonder if it would really matter _that_ much if he started throttling this Doctor. Worst case, Eyebrows would show up a little early and start a two-person Scottish independence movement with the ginger.

The Doctor gestured at the sky above them. “And I see some things haven’t changed: you’re still willing to team up with genocidal maniacs as long as it gets you what you want.”

 _And what are we, if not genocidal maniacs?_ he almost yelled in response, but managed to pull the words back just in time. The Doctor wouldn’t understand and the explanation would take more trouble than it would be worth just to see that self-righteous look vanish.

But oh, it would have been nice.

“I don’t even know what evil scheme you _think_ you’re foiling here,” the Master growled.

“You’re not as clever as you think you are,” the Doctor replied, “I’m sure I can figure it out…” He took something out of his pocket, “especially now that I’ve got that control bracelet of yours.” 

_When did he—?_

It must have been while they were kissing: the Doctor grabbed his wrists while he was distracted.

_Oh, well played._

The Doctor continued to smirk. “You know, it’s amazing what you can get away with stealing when everything’s on fire.”

“Was that a _compliment,_ Doctor?”

“No!”

“Kind of sounded like a compliment,” Amy agreed.

“Whose side are you on?” the Doctor asked her, sounding a bit flustered. He returned to the subject at hand— _in_ hand, more accurately. “Whatever you have planned for the Cybermen, you’re going to have a bit of an issue getting them to take your calls now.”

He almost looked _happy,_ which was going to make this next part fun.

The Master shrugged. “Keep it. Looks lovely on you.” He waved a hand vaguely upward. “Right now, they’re burning themselves up in the atmosphere. We figured it would keep things tidy.”

The Doctor paused. “Oh.”

“That’s why I chose the name!” he crowed, bursting into giggles again. That joke was never going to get old, at least in his opinion, which was the only opinion that mattered.

“So… now what?” Amy asked. “You cleared out the sky and gave the Doctor a snog—are you just going to wander off into Roman-era Britain now?”

“Not to worry,” the Master said. “I’ve got a ride coming shortly. I just need to pack up my kit first.” He moved as though he was about to turn his back on them… but then spun around in a full circle, wagging his finger in the Doctor’s face. “No shoving me into the Pandorica again. It’s not very sporting of you. In fact…” He took the tissue compression eliminator out of his pocket. 

The Doctor recognized it instantly. “Amy, run!”

“Oh, calm down, it’s not for you,” he scoffed, then fired it at the Pandorica.

What was once a prison large enough to hold a person was now a handy pocket-sized cube. “There we are,” he said, pushing the tiny doors shut and slipping it into his coat pocket. “All packed.” He put the TCE away as well. “Now, seeing as you don’t have a ride either, how _shall_ we pass the time?”

The Doctor looked at him stonily.

“Go for a stroll? Look at the flaming debris in the sky?” the Master suggested with a grin. “I’d suggest something a little more… intimate, but _somebody’s_ got sticky fingers, apparently.”

“Where is he?” the Doctor asked. “My future self, I mean.”

_Likely having a much better time than I am._

“If things are going as planned,” the Master said, trying not to noticeably grumble, _“she_ is probably busy shagging your wife right now.”

“She?” Amy asked, startled.

“My _wife?”_ the Doctor asked, even more startled.

* * *

_Come on, come_ _on_ _!_

River Song moved to another section of the TARDIS controls and flipped a set of switches that at this point she hoped would do _something,_ even if it wasn’t anything _good._

At least then it would demonstrate that she was having _any_ kind of effect on the TARDIS’s erratic movements through time and space. She wasn’t even sure if they were in the Time Vortex.

At this point, she wasn’t even sure that there _was_ a Time Vortex.

The universe was vanishing. If she hadn’t spent so much of her life dashing back and forth through history, would she even be aware of how much was lost to the cracks in time?

_You don’t know how much you don’t know even now. Let’s not get caught up in might-have-beens._

River took a deep breath and tried to ground herself in what she knew, while her hands frantically moved over the TARDIS controls, trying to make _anything_ happen.

Here was what she _did_ know: the universe was being slowly consumed by cracks in time and space.

These cracks were made when a TARDIS exploded on the 26th of June, 2010.

She was currently inside that particular TARDIS.

And, despite knowing how to pilot this TARDIS to such an extent that she could probably do it with her eyes closed (something that, she strongly suspected, the Doctor had done more than a few times), the TARDIS was doing literally everything _except_ what she was telling it to do.

She would have thought that the old girl was just being contrary but, from the sound of the engines, the TARDIS itself didn’t seem to want to do what it was doing right now.

_Come on!_

She pulled levers, pressed buttons, even banged on the console a few times.

 _Come_ _on_ _!_

How badly was she trapped by destiny right now? One particular date, one specific date that the TARDIS should _absolutely not go,_ and yet the inevitability of it was beginning to press down on River like a slab of stone.

She could hear the grinding noise of the TARDIS materialising. The second she was certain that she was no longer in the Vortex, she started keying in the commands to turn off the engines.

Nothing. The engines remained on, sounding worse and worse with every moment.

They were on Earth, she was certain. Twentieth century… no, twenty-first. Early twenty-first.

_No, come on, just this once, let it be a surprise…_

Northern hemisphere. Summer.

_Please, please, just give me this one thing…_

June.

_I’m sorry, my love—_

It was as though she could hear the Doctor scolding her:

 _Now just a minute, River—you’re not out of the fight yet! Come on, think about_ _what you_ _do_ _know. What do you know?_

She was inside the TARDIS. 

She could hear the engines creaking… structural integrity failing… explosion imminent… 

_Yes, fine, we’ve established the Impending Doom aspect of your circumstances already. What else?_

If the TARDIS engines were turned off, it wouldn’t explode. Probably.

_Right now, “probably” is the best you can hope for. What else?_

Since the controls weren’t listening to her, she would have to turn them off another way. 

_The Doctor taught you how to pilot the TARDIS. You know this ship. What do you know?_

If the TARDIS was empty, then the engines would turn off automatically.

Meaning that all she had to do was leave.

_There you go!_

She ran for the doors—

 _Please let_ _those_ _work, at least…_

—but before her fingers reached the handles, the door opened of its own accord—

_That’s new—_

—and she exited into the control room of another TARDIS.

She didn’t recognize this configuration, but the hum of the engines, the haphazard layout of the console equipment—hell, even the smell—this couldn’t be anywhere but the Doctor’s TARDIS.

“Close the door, you’re letting all the peril out!” The voice that spoke was (likely) female, youngish, vaguely Yorkshire by the sound of it—and doing its best imitation of a grumpy dad. “I’m not paying to fracture the whole universe, you know!”

River shut the door behind her and went around the console with her heart in her throat.

Bent over the TARDIS controls was a young-looking woman with a blonde bob and the kind of chaotic fashion sense that could only belong to one person.

River had kept track of all of his faces and those of most of his companions… and this face was unfamiliar.

This control room was unfamiliar.

Something was different. River wasn’t used to things being _different._ She wasn’t used to something being unexpected.

It was enough to make her forget about the possibility of everything exploding and destroying the universe.

“I didn’t know about you,” she said, almost in wonder.

The woman—the _Doctor—_ looked up at her with a smile, her fingers still flying over the controls. “I’m an Easter Egg. Bonus track.” She winked. “Spoilers.”

“Spoilers.” River breathed a sigh of relief. “Well… hello, Sweetie, what kind of utter nonsense are you up to _now?”_

The Doctor’s eyes lit up—Explanation Mode activated, apparently: “I’m giving the old girl a bit of a nudge—just a little bit, enough to cause a slight paradox. Very useful sometimes, paradoxes… sure, one wrong move and you erase your own grandmother, but sometimes it induces just enough absurdity to tweak the outcome from ‘inevitable’ to merely ‘improbable.’” She spread her arms wide. “Welcome to improbability!”

“And where would that be exactly?”

She checked a monitor on the console and flicked a few more switches. “June 27th. I scooted the TARDIS forward a few hours from its forced landing spot. The damage to the engines got too confused to continue and it’s now having a good long moment of introspection.”

“The _damage_ is having a moment of introspection?” River repeated, trying to make sure she heard her correctly.

The Doctor wiggled her hand from side to side. “Ish? Doesn’t matter—the point is that the cracks in the universe are currently being retconned out of existence.”

It almost seemed too good to be true. “You’re going to have to elaborate a bit more if I’m going to have any hope of explaining this to your past self.”

“No need.” The Doctor shook her head. “He doesn’t find out from you—in fact, he never finds out at all.”

“So you figured it out afterwards?” There must be some kind of stable time loop in effect. There usually was, but River found it odd that she was having so much trouble parsing it. Her unique conception and biology gave her a few abilities that were Time Lord-like (though not regeneration, not anymore), including the ability to sense the shape of events in time and space. Something felt… off.

“I had a lot of time to think about what I could have done differently,” the Doctor said. “There was too much temporal instability around these events. The cracks, Lake Silencio, Trenzalore… it made the Web too chaotic to control.” She appeared to have wrapped up whatever she had been working on, and stepped away from the console, wiping her hands on her trousers. “So I’m using the opportunity to iron out some wrinkles.”

The implications hit River before the Doctor had even finished talking. “You’re changing history.”

“I’m _fixing_ it. I can _do_ that,” she replied lightly, as though she wasn’t flat-out ignoring every warning she had ever given River about altering events, especially ones connected to her own timeline.

Knowing that there were huge swaths of her life that had already been experienced by other people, that were in a way fixed points in time, might have been enough to send someone into a state of despair over the thought that nothing could be changed. But River had long ago gotten used to the idea and did her best to live each day as though the outcome weren’t already set in stone somewhere behind a barricade of spoiler warnings.

Spoilers were not the same as secrets, although they had a great many things in common. Every spoiler was a secret, but not all secrets were revealed.

River had a secret that she once vowed never to reveal to anyone, especially the Doctor: if she were given the power to change her fate, she would take it in a heartbeat.

The Doctor that she knew would have been disappointed, but apparently this version of the Doctor had changed her opinion on the matter of interference.

Was that a good thing? River suspected that it wasn’t, but the temptation was still there and she had never been good at resisting temptation, especially where the Doctor was concerned.

“Why?” she finally asked.

“Why am I fixing things?” the Doctor asked. “Why not? These are unique circumstances: causality isn’t working the way that it should. There’s wiggle room.” She raised a coy eyebrow. “Speaking of which: care to have a wiggle?”

River laughed, already closing the distance between them. “Do we have time?”

“All the time in the world… especially since it’s not all about to implode in twenty minutes.”

They were now face to face… well, almost. “I’m finally taller than you, I see,” she remarked.

“About time.” And then there she was, hand on River’s cheek, drawing her in… “I’ve missed you.”

Her lips were so soft.

Regenerations made these things so _strange,_ trying to figure out where to put her hands and how hard she could push and how much time it would take and… 

_Oh._

The universe had just escaped its own annihilation _yet again_ and there was a version of the Doctor back in the second century who might be (read: was definitely) in some trouble, but everything was suddenly _different_ and River realised that she could take the time to enjoy herself because the Doctor said that she would fix everything, so she might as well focus on getting both of their clothes off and forget everything else for a little bit.

The act of “forgetting” was _extremely_ enjoyable.

_Ohh._

“I see you’ve had a bit more… experience,” River murmured afterwards.

The Doctor smirked. “Firsthand, even.” As usual, she looked more than a little proud of herself. “I’ve got one more trick to show you.”

“What is it?”

By way of an answer, the Doctor leaned in and kissed her again.

This one was different: it was like light was moving through her… inside of her… in fact, it felt a bit like… 

The Doctor sat back, looking at her expectantly.

River looked at her own hands and saw a yellow glow fade, as though it was being absorbed into her skin.

It was _just_ like—

Her stomach dropped. “Did you just give me some of your regenerations?”

It wasn’t supposed to work like that, _she_ was the one who was supposed to save the Doctor, not the other was around, that was _her_ sacrifice, she wasn’t going to let the Doctor throw away her life and future like that, not when River had gone to all that trouble—

The Doctor stroked her face. “No no no, not that. I gave you a full set of your own. That’s all.”

_“How?”_

“I went to Gallifrey. Brought you back a souvenir. What do you think?”

“You’re _mad.”_ She didn’t even know what this meant… did this mean that she might not meet whatever fate she had seen in the younger Doctor’s eyes?

“You deserve more time,” the Doctor whispered, still stroking River’s cheek, “and now you have it. Go enjoy yourself. Take a few more risks, kiss a few more folks, do something utterly brilliant even if it takes a few decades or centuries to pull off. You have time.”

“I’d want to spend some of it with you.” She kept waiting for the impact of this news to hit her, but it was being surprisingly aloof at the moment.

“With him, perhaps,” the Doctor said, looking a little sad. “I’m on a different path.”

“So this was, what, one last hurrah?”

“I’m with someone else now.”

Something about that stung and River couldn’t figure out why. “You’ve been with other people before and that didn’t stop us,” she pointed out, partly to the Doctor and partly to herself, “and since you gave me these regenerations…” She didn't want to say _I’ll outlive all your companions,_ but the Doctor would still know what she meant.

So if the Doctor still thought that it would be an issue… and she had been to Gallifrey…

The penny dropped. “They’re another Time Lord.”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Doesn’t matter.” The Doctor’s expression was like a slammed door.

“And they’re not keen on you spending time with other partners?” 

“It’s complicated.”

River felt the muscles in her jaw tighten. “So I was right: this _was_ your last little dalliance with me.”

“It wasn’t meaningless, not to me,” the Doctor insisted. “You’re my wife, of course it meant something.”

“Was.”

“What?”

“I _was_ your wife. You moved on.” She stood up and started dressing. “The version of you who hasn’t married me yet is still stuck in the second century, and he’s the one I’d prefer to see right now.” She didn’t even feel bitter… just tired.

The Doctor nodded, putting on her own clothes and heading to the controls. “I’ll swing by Roman Britain and take people home.” 

The TARDIS dematerialised with that old familiar sound.

“I think this was a good day’s work,” the Doctor said brightly. She was, as usual, preferring to distract herself rather than deal with anything too emotionally fraught. River decided to just let her do it; they would be saying goodbye soon anyway. “I got to save the universe and play Father Christmas with regenerations, Amy’s life will make sense again, Rory’s back and not plastic, random bits and bobs will be put back where they belong, and nothing will be sneaking in through those little cracks, _especially_ the Time Lords.”

“The Time Lords?” Something about the way she had said that… it almost sounded like she was _spitting_ the words.

The Doctor’s fingers tightened on the controls. The look on her face indicated that she probably hadn’t meant to say that bit. “Never mind them. They’re not a problem anymore.”

That feeling from earlier returned: the nagging sense that something was off. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. It’s all fixed.”

River crossed her arms over her chest. “Come on, I know you. Rule One: the Doctor lies.”

Something in her eyes flashed with an anger River had never seen before. “I’m not the Doctor anymore.” The expression on her face hardened. “I’m done with lying. There’s been too much of it.”

“Then tell me the truth,” River said, for the first time in her life unsure if she was in danger or not. “If you’re not the Doctor, then who are you?”

“The Valeyard.” That hard look persisted. “I’m fixing what went wrong, all the things that the Time Lords ruined.” She shut her eyes for a moment. “Some of the things that I ruined too.”

“That name… why would you change your name?”

“Because I can. Because there are things that needed to be done that the Doctor couldn’t do.”

“Like during the War.” The terrible actions that had been taken (or not taken, or almost taken) to end the Time War… what had happened this time to make the Doctor abandon her own name?

The… Valeyard… gave a slight nod but said nothing more.

River thought back to her earlier statement: _Come on, I know you._

It wasn’t true. Not anymore.

But that didn’t mean that it couldn’t be true again one day. She had time now, so much time: she could spend it getting to know this new version of the person she married and had loved for so many years and lifetimes. 

Things could change. Perhaps one day she would take up the name of the Doctor again. Not that River planned to hold her breath until that happened—she wasn’t the type to put her entire life on hold for the sake of a starry-eyed romance—but it was going to be an adjustment to truly understand that nothing was set in stone anymore. Her relationship with the version of the Doctor she had last seen only a few hours ago was not an inevitability. She couldn’t take it for granted.

_Had I been taking it for granted all this time?_

The thought didn’t sit well with her.

Well, the Doctor—Valeyard, rather—wasn’t the only one who could distract herself rather than confront her feelings. River examined the TARDIS still sitting in the control room. “So there’s no danger of it exploding?”

The noise of the outer TARDIS stopped; they had arrived. “None at all,” the Valeyard said. “The engines are beyond knackered, though. It’ll take him ages to repair it. Fortunately, he’ll have time.”

River felt a sudden chill. “What do you mean?”

“I have some other things to deal with, so I’m time-locking the area so he can’t leave and meddle like he usually does.”

“Then you made a mistake in telling me,” she said, bolting for the door.

She had enough of a head start that she could make it back to the chamber under Stonehenge and warn him—

River opened the door to the TARDIS and ran out into what she realised a second too late was not Roman times.

It was her cell in the Stormcage prison.

She whirled around to glare at the Valeyard. “I thought you were done with lying.”

“I didn’t lie. I said I’d take everyone home.” She gestured at the cell. “Welcome home.”

“This prison can’t hold me. You know that.” She’d be out of there in minutes.

“You can escape, but good luck finding another vortex manipulator. By the time you manage to reach him, it’ll be too late to change anything I’ve done.”

“And what is that?”

The Valeyard held a finger to her lips and gave her a small smile. “Spoilers.”

_Damn her._

“And where are _you_ going?” River demanded.

The expression on the Valeyard’s face was now more teeth than smile. “Where I’ve always been going,” she said. “Home, the long way round.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I'm posting this about two days after "Fugitive of the Judoon" and, without spoiling anything, there was a moment in there where I was audibly screaming "Don't say 'the Valeyard' DON'T SAY 'THE VALEYARD' _I HAVE PLANS FOR A FIC, CHRIS"_
> 
> (I was VERY pleased with the actual result, though, in case anyone was wondering)
> 
> Since I'm writing this concurrently with the season airing, I know there are going to be a lot of curveballs but HOLY CRAP, this week's episode was a massive reminder that I have no idea what's coming AT ALL, so I will just be leaning into this as an AU as usual.


	4. Countdown: Ten

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _My crooked back was built for teeth and claws_  
>  _The bloody wrath of tiny gods_  
>  _Tear at me, tear at me, until I'm tame_  
>  _This is what I was manufactured for:_  
>  _The dirt, the dark, the art of war_  
>  _Punish me, punish me, until I'm saved_  
> 
> 
> **Setting:** Series 3, Episode 12: "The Sound of Drums"

_Oh my god._

It was like being pulled through a straw. An actual-sized her through a regular-sized straw.

Martha Jones reminded herself that vomiting would have to wait until later. “Oh, that thing is rough!”

“I’ve had worse nights.” Jack Harkness said, hauling himself to his feet from where he had collapsed onto the railing.

Martha tried not to roll her eyes. _You’ve made your point: you’re Mister Cool Torchwood Agent. Could you knock it off for just a moment?_

Jack continued: “Welcome to the _Valiant.”_

“It’s dawn?” Martha asked, looking through the porthole and seeing… nothing. “Hold on, I thought this was a ship. Where’s the sea?”

“A ship for the twenty first century,” he said, joining her at the window, “protecting the skies of planet Earth.”

_Or you could have just said “it flies.”_

She had to remind herself that it wasn’t Jack Harkness that she wanted to throttle right now, but Harold Saxon.

_He took them. Oh my god, he has them here._

_An actual for-real Evil Alien Overlord abducted my family._

_Deep breaths. Save that adrenaline for something useful._

The Doctor took off running through the massive engine complex.

 _That works,_ Martha thought as she and Jack ran after him.

Since the Doctor was being uncharacteristically silent, Martha took the opportunity to seethe over what he had said before they teleported onto the _Valiant: “I’m not here to kill him. I’m here to save him.”_

He might not be here to kill Saxon, but _she_ would certainly try. She was _very_ good at anatomy.

Maybe the Hippocratic Oath would make an exception for non-Earthlings, she thought grimly.

_He has them he has them oh my god he has them Mum and Dad and Tish he has them…_

Oh, _and_ he was the damn _Prime Minister._

_I can’t believe I was going to vote for him._

The Doctor stopped so suddenly that she almost ran into him.

“We don’t have time for sightseeing!” Jack hissed, annoyed.

The Doctor replied with that shushing noise he always made when he was thinking about two hundred things at once. “Can’t you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“Doctor, my family’s on board,” Martha reminded him as she pushed past. Whatever technological mystery he was distracted by could wait until afterwards.

“Brilliant,” the Doctor said, obviously not paying attention to a word she just said, and raced off in the completely opposite direction down a flight of stairs. “This way!”

Martha had no choice but to follow.

_Please let it be them that he’s sensing, please let it be them, please let this be easy—_

What she discovered when the Doctor flung open a set of double doors, however, was almost as welcome a sight: the TARDIS, tucked snugly between two stacks of crates.

“Oh, at last!” the Doctor cried, relieved.

“Oh, _yes!”_ she said simultaneously as they bolted to the familiar blue box. Now that they had the TARDIS again, everything would be all right. Saxon might have an aircraft carrier, but an aircraft carrier couldn’t teleport or travel through time. 

“What’s it doing on the _Valiant?”_ Jack asked, following behind. He sounded suspicious, which Martha could understand in a way, but did he have to ruin _every_ moment?

They opened the TARDIS doors and—

Jack’s tone matched the horror they were all feeling. “What the hell’s he done?”

The whole control room was bathed in a dim red light, and the center console was wrapped in some kind of _cage—_

“Don’t touch it!” the Doctor warned.

“I’m not going to,” Jack replied, sounding a tiny bit annoyed.

“What’s he done, though?” Martha asked as they approached it. “Sounds like it’s sick.”

The Doctor looked like he was on the verge of tears. “It can’t be. No no no no no no, it _can’t_ be.”

If this was something that he couldn’t fix—something on his _own ship—_ “Doctor, what is it?”

“He’s cannibalised the TARDIS.”

Martha felt her stomach drop. The TARDIS was practically alive. It didn’t just sound sick—it _was_ sick. It was in _pain._

 _Is there_ _nothing_ _that monster won’t abuse?_

Apparently Jack recognized something in the alterations. “Is this what I think it is?” he asked.

A new voice piped up from somewhere below their feet: “It’s a paradox machine.”

Martha froze. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that the Doctor and Jack had frozen as well.

“You’ll find a dial to your right, Doctor—well, more like a timer.” A piece of the floor grates moved and a blonde woman stuck her head out of it. “It’s scheduled to go off at two minutes past eight.”

For a brief second, Martha thought that it was Lucy Saxon—the hair wasn’t too different and most of her face was obscured by a pair of goggles—but the voice, although familiar, was far too Northern.

“Who are you?” Jack demanded; Martha noticed that his hand had automatically reached for a weapon in his coat that was obviously no longer there.

“Well, to rest your worries, I’ll start with this bit: I’m _not_ the person who cobbled this nightmare together. _That_ person was the Master, and it’s due to go off at two past eight because, as you’re well aware, he’s unable to do anything without making a multimedia production out of it.”

Martha noticed that she was _smiling_ as she said that.

The Doctor had moved just enough to put the strange woman in his line of sight, but still hadn’t said a word. 

“Still waiting for an answer on who you are,” Jack said, “and how you got in here.”

The woman gave her necklace a slight tug. “Got a key to the TARDIS.”

Another companion? For another mad second, Martha wondered if this was the famous Rose Tyler that the Doctor (and Jack) wouldn’t stop going on and on about. They _had_ said that she was blonde… 

But, given all that, if it _was_ Rose then they wouldn’t both be looking at her with that expression of alarm.

“And got one of these—” She held up a small cylindrical device and pressed a switch.

The sound it emitted… Martha knew that sound.

It was a sonic screwdriver.

“No…” The Doctor’s jaw dropped. “No, no, _really?”_

The woman put the screwdriver away and wiggled her fingers in a greeting. “Hi.”

“Past or future?” Jack asked the Doctor quietly.

“Future,” the Doctor said, shaking his head in astonishment. “How many?” he asked the woman.

“Spoilers,” she scolded him. “I’m not the next up, I’ll say that much.”

Martha remembered her words to the Doctor back when they first encountered Jack: _“Is that what happens, though? Do you just get bored with us one day and disappear?”_

 _“Not if you’re blonde,”_ Jack had quipped.

Martha didn’t want to know… except that she might as well know now. “Is she my replacement?”

“No,” the Doctor said, still staring at the woman in front of him. “She’s mine.”

“What?” Martha has only learned about regenerations the previous day and was still trying to make sense of it. “She’s… you change genders too?”

“Sometimes,” the woman replied sunnily. “I got the upgrade.” She lifted the goggles up, revealing her eyes. “Hello, Martha Jones,” she said with a wink.

There. Martha could hear it now: that familiar cadence, despite the different accent and voice, saying her name in the exact same tone. The way that she explained things by not exactly explaining it but by circling around it like a shark. That mischief in her eyes. “Hello, Doctor,” Martha replied, feeling a little shy.

“So!” The Doctor—the future one—climbed out of the floor. “I’ve been taking a look: it goes all the way down through the whole engine system. It’s going to be a massive job untangling it and we don’t have enough time before it activates.”

The Doctor—the one Martha knew—went to help her up, but drew his hand back at the last second. She lunged forward and grabbed his wrist anyway. “Don’t worry,” she reassured him as she got to her feet. “It’s like the old days: we can touch without breaking anything.”

“What can you tell me?” the Doctor asked urgently.

She sighed. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t stop the paradox machine from activating, but the Archangel Network was what fixed it in the end: there’s a lot of psychic energy built up in that, more than the Master realises right now. It stabilised things enough that the machine could be destroyed without blowing up the TARDIS _or_ the entire solar system.”

“But _he’s_ the one who controls the Archangel,” Martha pointed out.

“Yes,” she agrees, _“but_ there’s a catch: like any big communications system, it’s vulnerable to hacking.”

“With computers?” Jack asked.

The Future Doctor shook her head. “Not to the degree that we need. It’s a big psychic network, so it has to be hacked in the same way.” She looked at the Doctor. “Took you a whole year to work your way in.”

“It’s going to take a _year?”_ Martha exclaimed. How could they possibly hold out against the Master for an entire year?

“Do you know how much damage he could do in a year?” Jack added.

“I know how much damage he could do in an _hour,”_ the Future Doctor countered, “but it’s not going to take a year this time.”

To Martha’s surprise, the Doctor didn’t seem to be following along. He looked like he was stuck in his own head, his thoughts going around in circles as an odd expression spread across his face.

Which was extremely surprising, because Martha knew exactly what the Future Doctor was implying: “Since you’re his future self, that year is already in your past, which means that you already know how to do it.”

“Exactly! Good old Martha, how I’ve missed you.” She grinned.

“But hold on,” Martha continued as the rest of it caught up with her, “if you stop the Master _now,_ then _this_ Doctor won’t get the chance to learn how to hack into the Archangel Network, so then how would his future self know how to do it?”

“It’s a paradox,” Jack said.

“Did you forget that we’re standing less than a meter away from a literal _paradox machine?”_ the Future Doctor exclaimed. “It can take a little timey-wimey cheating. We'll be fine.”

Martha glanced at her Doctor for confirmation, but he still looked like he was trying to count backwards in ten different languages simultaneously.

“What are the Toclafane?” he said at last.

“Hopefully, you’ll never find out,” his future incarnation said, now giving the TARDIS console a closer examination.

Jack looked at his watch. “It’s 7:58. We have four minutes until the machine activates.”

“Doctor, my family is somewhere on this ship,” Martha reminded him. “I’ve got to find them.”

“We’ve got to stop the Master first,” Jack countered.

“Oh, don’t worry about him,” the Future Doctor said brightly. She pulled off her goggles and tossed them to the floor. “I’ve got my best man on it.”

“Against the Master?” Jack asked. “He’d better be ready for a challenge.”

“Oh, he is.” She looked at the Doctor and grinned. “He’s foiled even more of the Master’s plans than we have.”

After a moment of silence, the Doctor’s jaw dropped. “…you’re kidding.”

For some reason, she looked almost smug. “Well, he _is_ his own worst enemy, after all.” She gave the cage around the TARDIS controls a gentle pat. “But I suppose we should go check on how it’s going.”

“How do you know that they’re not just going to join forces?” the Doctor demanded as they headed for the TARDIS doors.

The Future Doctor turned and grinned even wider than before. “Because I’m his _best_ enemy. Now come on, this’ll be fun.”

* * *

_Did I really think that was a good look?_

The Master expected to react in any number of ways to seeing his younger self again, but his primary reaction was an incredible level of disdain for the man’s haircut.

_It looks one gust of wind away from being Boris Johnson._

Speaking of which, he could count at least five schemes off the top of his head that probably contributed to Brexit in some way. He could also list another eight instances of the Doctor’s meddling over the years that had helped cause it as well.

_Matter at hand, focus on the matter at hand…_

_Focus on how satisfying it’s going to be to have that psychotic bastard cowering at your feet._

Said psychotic bastard, meanwhile, was sitting at the table in the center of the room, offering his wife a jelly baby.

Seeing Lucy again, he couldn’t help feeling a little wistful. For a human, she was reasonably attractive. 

_Hang on… do I have a thing for blondes?_

_Answer that question later. For now, focus on the plan._

Oh, Lucy had been fun. He’d never really had a pet before, and she was so very impressed with everything he did. He could sort of understand why the Doctor enjoyed having one or two around: she laughed at his jokes, oooed and ahhed at all the things he showed her, and believed that they were partners in his devious schemes. 

But once he had the Doctor locked up on the _Valiant_ with him, Lucy became considerably less fun by comparison. Just another miserable thing for him to be cruel to.

In retrospect, it wasn’t really a surprise that she killed him. Kick a dog often enough and of course it’ll bite back. In fact, the recollection of how that year went gave him a bit of a twinge now.

_Well, at least that won’t happen to her this go-around. She can go back to her dull colorless life and maybe write a book on what it was like being married to Harold Saxon, Britain’s fourth-worst Prime Minister._

He hadn’t needed any tricks to get on board the _Valiant_ other than a brief flourish of the Valeyard’s psychic paper. Wearing a suit and a bland expression, his presence was questioned by very few people, and no one ushered him off the bridge when the broadcast began. Unlike _some_ people he could name, he had a talent for blending in when necessary, which was why _he_ was here on the bridge and _she_ was off poking around the paradox machine.

He could feel the hum of the Archangel Network, still warm and welcoming and reassuring everyone that things would be fine as long as they believed in Harold Saxon.

It had been just as easy to sneak back into the Network (and help the Valeyard nip in after him) as it had been to sneak onto the ship. 

All he had to do now was wait.

The American President was only slightly more tedious than Saxon; the sound of his voice grated on the Master like a rock being scraped against metal. And, unlike Saxon at the moment, he would _not stop talking._ He just kept prattling on and _on_ about how puny humans always looked at the stars and had hopes and dreams and generally behaving as though _he_ was the one responsible for this massive paradigm shift, despite the Earth having been nearly-destroyed by aliens on an almost weekly basis over the past fifty years. At this point, the term ‘first contact’ was a joke.

“ …and I ask you now, I ask of the human race, to join with me in welcoming our friends. I give you… the Toclafane.”

_Here we go…_

Four spheres manifested in the air above the President’s head.

The Master could see the amusement on Saxon’s face grow with every awkward word the American stammered. And, when the Toclafane started grumbling about how they wanted to talk to “the Mister Master” instead, he watched Saxon rise to his feet, ready to take center stage.

_Just a few more seconds…_

“Oh, all right then,” Saxon proclaimed, his voice _dripping_ with false modesty. “It’s me.” He spread his arms wide as he faced the rest of the room. “Tada! Sorry, sorry, I have this effect. People just get obsessed. Is it the smile? Is it the aftershave? Is it the capacity to laugh at myself? I don’t know. It’s crazy.”

_There’s my cue._

“If I were to guess, I’d say it’s the capacity to laugh at yourself,” the Master said, stepping out from where he had been standing against the wall. He cleared his throat. “Ha. Ha. _Haaaa.”_

And for one beautiful moment, that smug grin vanished.

“Jelly baby?” the Master offered, holding out a paper bag of his own.

 _“You’re_ the next one?” Saxon looked a bit disgusted.

In spite of himself, he couldn’t help feeling a tad offended. “What, not impressed?”

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t have gotten elected Prime Minister looking like _you.”_

“Ugh, I forgot what a massive _prick_ you were.”

“Saxon, what the hell is going on?” the President demanded.

“Never you mind, Uncle Sam,” Saxon said with a nasty grin. “Just a few personal matters to clear up.” He nodded to the Toclafane. “Kill him, then take care of this one.”

Well, it wasn’t the first time Saxon had tried to murder him, after all. This time, he came prepared: reaching into the paper bag, the Master pulled out his tissue compression eliminator.

_One shot—two shots—three shots—_

There was a fourth shot as the remaining Toclafane blasted the President to pieces, and then— _one last shot—_ it too was compressed down into a tiny ball.

Unfortunately, due to the pandemonium on the bridge, he wasn’t able to hear what was probably a delightful sound as each of the shrunken Toclafane hit the deck.

With a snarl on his face, Saxon started towards him, reaching a hand into his coat to take out his own weapon.

“Ooo, watch your step,” the Master warned. “I wouldn’t want you to slip on all those marbles.”

His younger self still looked disgusted. “Really? A TCE?”

“I prefer to stick with the classics. Lasers are passe. Speaking of which,” he said, aiming the device in his direction, “toss it to the floor.”

“Your little toy means nothing,” Saxon sneered. “It’s not like you’d shoot me.”

 _Give me one more minute._ “Oh, you know how we can get sometimes: I’m bananas. Can’t make heads or tails of what I’m doing half the time.”

Guards were swarming the bridge now, guns drawn. “Nobody move!” came a dozen cries from around them.

Saxon’s eyes lit up with inspiration. “Look, everyone: a terrorist is hijacking the plane!” he shouted.

The bridge erupted with gunfire. With a growl of frustration, the Master dove for cover behind the stairs leading up to the helm. “Oh, _come on!”_

Time to revise his previous statement: _colossal_ prick.

Fortunately, the TCE had some range to it: he was thinning out the folks with guns… well, making them smaller, which technically counted as thinner.

_Want to be smaller, ladies? You can!_

Even though it had been ages since the Adelaide Gallery, he couldn’t help giggling a little at that.

The air behind him rippled, and then a quartet of familiar figures appeared on the level above him. 

“Get down!” the Valeyard cried. After dropping to the deck, she peered over the edge to see him. “Well, this was roughly how I expected it to go.”

“You don’t have to kill them!” The Doctor’s face joined her a moment later, his expression initially a glare but then shifting to confusion. “Hang on, didn’t we—”

“1969, kissed outside of a chip shop, glad to see you found your way back,” the Master replied, then continued firing into the crowd.

“That was _you?”_ the Valeyard said, just as confused. It _had_ been a long time ago for her, after all, and the subsequent events in her original timeline had overshadowed the memory of that brief tryst.

“Surprise!” He _really_ didn’t remember hiring so many armed guards in the original timeline. Even with the Archangel Network blurring their concentration, they were still enough of a threat to make things inconvenient.

“You _kissed_ him?” someone shouted from behind the Doctor; presumably Jack Harkness.

“What the hell _was_ that?” the Doctor demanded of the Master. “What were you doing there?”

“Taking you out on a damn date! It’s not _always_ galactic domination and murderous rampages with me, you know!”

“Yes it is,” the Valeyard cut in. She looked around the deck, which was still covered in the granola-like remains of the American President. “We’re not lying in what I think we’re lying in, are we?”

The Master put a hand over his mouth in pretend-shock. “Oopsie.”

The Valeyard glared at him, exasperated. “We talked about this!”

“What do you mean you _talked_ about this?” the Doctor asked, bewildered.

“It was the Toclafane who shot him, not me!” he protested.

“Wait, was this the President?” Jack asked.

“It was only the President- _Elect,”_ the Master replied, annoyed. “He wasn’t even the real one yet. They’ve got spares.”

“Pretty sure that’s not how elections work,” Jack retorted.

“How would you know? Have _you_ ever won one?”

“Hold on, you’re the future version of the _Master?”_ Martha Jones leaned over the edge as well.

 _Well, you don’t have to sound so surprised._ “How many other people do you see walking around with tech too advanced for twenty-first century Earth?” he asked.

“Quite a few, actually…” Her voice sounded troubled. 

_Ada’s work is finally starting to seep into the future, I see._

“Fair point,” he conceded. “Now will you all shut up and let me concentrate, seeing as I’m the only one here who bothered to bring a weapon?”

“Stop killing people!” the Doctor snarled. “Stop it now!”

“Can’t, I’m afraid. Too many people on this bridge. Fire hazard. Very dangerous.”

The Valeyard snorted with a brief laugh. “Come on, it’s about to get a lot more crowded around here,” she told the others. “We’ve got to find a way to boot Saxon out of the Archangel Network and—oh no,” she groaned. “Brace yourselves, here it comes!”

He could sense the paradox machine activating.

_Ooo, tingly._

Unfortunately, that heralded the arrival of _more bloody Toclafane._

Six _billion_ of the little monsters, to be exact.

The Valeyard had finally made it around to the helm controls. “Not too late, we can fix this…”

“Is this what happened the last time?” the Doctor asked. The tone in his voice was growing increasingly suspicious.

“Remember to turn the music off!” the Master called up to her. “I’m embarrassed enough by him as it is!”

“Doctor, what is that?” Jack asked, looking out the window where a tear in time and space was forming.

“End of the world,” the Doctor said, his voice shaking.

“Go distract Saxon,” the Valeyard said. “I need time with this.”

“How are we supposed to distract him?” Martha asked.

“Not you,” the Valeyard replied briskly. “Go find your family, they’re locked up nearby. Jack, go with her. Grab a gun on the way, you’ll probably need it.”

“What?” The Doctor was shocked.

 _“You,”_ the Valeyard ordered him, “are the one who needs to distract Saxon. You’re the only person in the room who he won’t kill instantly.”

“Why would you tell them to—”

“Stop the apocalypse now, debate responsible gun ownership later!” the Master snapped. 

The Doctor glared down at him. “This is your fault. I don’t know how, but this is your fault.”

_Oh, if you only knew…_

“It usually is,” the Master admitted, “but I’m not _your_ responsibility. I’m hers.” He nodded in Saxon’s direction. “And _he’s_ yours.”

The Doctor looked like he wanted to keep arguing, but he nodded and jumped down to the main deck. “Stop! Stop, and I’ll surrender.” He raised his arms.

“Hold!” Saxon held up a hand and the gunfire stopped. 

“Let them go,” the Doctor said, indicating his pets, who had been making their way down the side of the room. “Let them go, and you can have me.”

Saxon indicated the rest of the room. “I’ve got you anyway,” he pointed out.

“I didn’t realise we were so predictable,” the Master muttered as he watched the Doctor verbally spar with his younger self. “How’s it going up there?” he called to the Valeyard as quietly as he could manage.

“Slower than I’d like,” she replied. “We’ll have to get him out of the way instead. Have you got enough space to open it up?”

“If Sandshoes would scoot a little to the left, then yes.” He fired just past the Doctor’s ear, hitting a guard as a nice bonus. “Move, you skinny twit!”

“Why is _he_ here?” Saxon demanded, pointing at the Master. 

“Oh, you know me,” he replied, “I love a good disaster.”

“This is no time to flirt, you know,” the Valeyard said.

“And who’s _she?”_ Saxon yelled.

“I’m the good disaster,” the Valeyard said cheerfully. “And you really should move a few steps to the left, Doctor.”

“This wasn’t how it happened before, was it?” the Doctor said, turning to face her with an expression that was now _entirely_ one of suspicion. “The two of you, you’re changing—”

“Whoops, can’t hear you, too busy saving your skin!” the Master yelled, cutting him off as he stepped out from behind the cover of the stairs. “Earthlings, Time Lords, Toclafane, and all of you watching at home: take a look at this little marvel!” He pulled the black cube out of his pocket and tossed it onto the floor a few meters away. “And now for a technological breakthrough the likes of which none of you—including you, Mister Prime Minister—have ever seen!” He held up the TCE with a flourish. “I finally got around to putting in an undo button.”

Two guards raced forward, guns drawn, but before any of them could act, the Master took aim at the cube and fired. 

The guards were flung backwards by the very sudden expansion of the Pandorica returning to its original dimensions.

“What,” the Doctor said flatly, then raised his voice in incredulity. _“What?”_

“What the hell _is_ that thing?” Saxon said.

“Your new home away from home, Prime Minister,” the Valeyard replied.

The Master walked around to the other side of the Pandorica so he could address Saxon directly. “The drumming in your head… the four beats hammering to the rhythm of your hearts, the one that you shoved into everyone’s minds with the Archangel: it’s real,” the Master said, picking up the explanation where the Valeyard left off. “It’s not a figment of your fevered imagination.”

Saxon stared at him, an expression on his face that was almost… hopeful.

“It wasn’t the Untempered Schism that did it,” the Valeyard explained. “It was the Time Lords. Rassilon used you—he used all of us, but you most of all.” The growing fury in her voice made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

“He put something in our mind,” the Master growled, feeling the same rage blooming inside of him. “A beacon, one that the Time Lords could use to escape their fate at the end of the war.”

“Only they would bring the entire war back with them.” She looked at the Doctor. “It would have made everything we did meaningless.”

“Not to mention it would have ended all of existence. So we’re going to shove you in this thing instead,” the Master said, giving the side of the Pandorica a little tap. Inside, he could hear the unlocking mechanisms going to work. “Without you to guide them in, they’ll stay put.”

“You can’t!” the Doctor and Saxon both snapped.

“Nice to see you two finally agreeing on something,” he said, “but this isn’t a debate.”

“Let me take him away from here,” the Doctor pleaded. “Whatever they did to him, I can help—”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Saxon snarled. He level his laser screwdriver in the Doctor’s direction, “especially with you!”

“Oh, stop pretending that you’re going to kill him,” the Master scoffed. “We both know he’s your perfect audience. You’ll keep him around no matter what—for crying out loud, you made a _mixtape_ for him!”

The Doctor’s face scrunched up in confusion. “You made what?”

“And it’s a rubbish one, too,” the Master added.

“You don’t know _anything,”_ Saxon sneered. He stepped closer until the weapon was almost touching the Doctor’s forehead.

“Doctor!” Martha cried. She and Jack started running—

Saxon turned and shot her in the chest.

Martha crumpled to the ground, her eyes still open and staring at nothing.

“And now,” Saxon said, delighted, “let’s invite in some special guests to swat the rest of these flies.”

About a dozen Toclafane shimmered into existence on the bridge. Outside, the air was full of them.

But the Master was likely the only one who noticed, because everyone else’s attention was on the late Martha Jones.

Including the Valeyard, whose scream was the loudest of all.

_“MARTHA!”_

And then everything _stopped._

The Master couldn’t help his gasp of anticipation.

 _Oh, this is going to be_ _fantastic_ _._

He wasn’t the only one with the ability to access the psychic power of the Archangel Network: the Doctor had spent an entire year working his way in, finding a way to tap into the hopes of billions of humans looking for a saviour.

The Master had used it to become Prime Minister. The Doctor had used it to become a _god._

The little showoff. 

He still remembered the chill that ran down his spine when the Doctor held him and said the worst thing of all: _“I forgive you.”_

So of course he decided to die just to spite the self-righteous holier-than-thou smarty-pants.

The person on the bridge of the _Valiant,_ glowing with the brilliance of the Archangel, still looked like a god.

She just wasn’t a merciful one.

And she was definitely not about to forgive _anyone._

* * *

_What the_ _hell_ _?_

One minute, Jack was running across the bridge _(come on faster go faster)_ and then he saw a flash of light and Martha fell to the ground _(no no no I should have gotten in the way I should have taken the blast in her place this is my fault all my fault I can’t even die correctly no no no no no)_ and then he heard two voices scream along with his own—

_“MARTHA!”_

And then something _happened._

Ever since the Doctor first pointed out the effect of the Archangel Network—the four taps, slightly syncopated—Jack found that if he concentrated he could hear it faintly in the back of his mind.

After the scream, the rhythm stopped and what remained was a _void,_ except for one thing: the future version of the Doctor.

And then the beat started again, loud enough to overwhelm his senses, loud enough to knock him over, loud enough to knock everyone on the bridge onto their hands and knees.

Her eyes were almost on fire. She was glowing. She was _floating._

_What the hell is going on?_

He heard the Doctor nearby, shouting at his future regeneration: “Stop this right now! _Stop it!”_

Saxon managed to stagger back to his feet but didn’t stay there for long: the Future Doctor clenched a fist and the laser device crumpled in a shower of sparks. With a wave of her hand, Saxon was thrown across the bridge, hitting the far wall with enough force to leave a dent.

Her expression… she was fury incarnate.

 _“YOU,”_ she said, floating closer to where Saxon landed; Jack could hear her voice in his _bones. “OUT OF ALL OF YOUR SELVES, YOU ARE BY FAR THE CRUELEST.”_

Saxon was lifted up into the air as though an invisible hand was wrapped around his throat. _“YOU DESERVE NOTHING,”_ she said. _“YOU_ _ARE_ _NOTHING. AND SO I GIVE YOU_ _NOTHING_ _.”_

The sound of Saxon’s neck snapping was audible throughout the entire room.

 _“No!”_ the current Doctor screamed.

Glancing over at the Master’s future regeneration, Jack was surprised to see that not only was he still _there,_ he actually looked a little smug.

Jack had seen the Doctor do some pretty strange things… but this was something far beyond _‘strange.’_

For the first time, he could actually _see_ the person who burned the Time Lords and the Daleks in order to end a war.

Saxon’s lifeless body was thrown inside the massive black cube in the center of the room, pinned into a seat. The straps wrapped around him and held him in place. With another wave of her hand, the doors to the box slammed shut.

She then reached out a hand towards Martha…

As she did, Jack could have sworn that he heard another voice in his head, one from so long ago and so familiar: _I bring life._

With a sudden gasp, Martha sat up. Alive.

“Doctor?” she whispered, looking up at the Future Doctor with wide eyes. “How—?”

“You hurt our Mister Master!” one of the Toclafane cried, sounding like a petulant child.

“That wasn’t very nice!” another one added.

The future version of the Doctor turned to face them.

 _“TOCLAFANE,”_ she said. _“YOUR MASTER IS NO MORE. YOU WILL LEAVE THIS WORLD.”_

“Our Master told us that this would be our new home! The old place had nothing but the cold and the dark and the screaming—”

_“IF YOU STAY, YOUR FATE WILL BE FAR WORSE.”_

“We heard what the little girl called you. You are the Doctor! The Doctor is too weak to hurt anyone!”

_“I AM NOT THE DOCTOR.”_

Jack blinked. _What?_

_“I AM THE VALEYARD… AND YOU WILL OBEY ME.”_

Behind him, the Doctor cried out in anguish.

_What the hell is a Valeyard?_

“We don’t like you,” the Toclafane replied, “and we won’t listen to—”

_“THEN DIE.”_

“No!” the Doctor screamed again, but it was too late: the alien spheres both inside and outside the ship crumbled to dust and then to nothing at all. The light surrounding the Valeyard grew so bright that Jack couldn’t see a thing for a few moments, and he wondered if they were _all_ about to die, even him.

When the light faded back to a more bearable level, Jack looked around and found that he was in the front room of Martha’s flat… which was somehow not a pile of rubble from when the Master set a bomb off in it the day before.

Martha, her parents, and her sister were there too, as was the Doctor, the Valeyard, and the future incarnation of the Master. Parked in opposite corners of the room were two mostly-identical versions of the TARDIS.

The Valeyard was still glowing, but slowly descending back to the ground until she was face to face with the Master, who was staring at her in such awe that Jack wouldn’t have been surprised if the Time Lord dropped to his knees.

“You could burn it down,” the Master whispered to her. “All of it. Like before.”

Jack froze. What had happened _before?_

“No.” The last of the radiance faded and she smiled at him. “I like it here.”

“You and your sentimentality,” he grumbled, and then kissed her.

 _Okay,_ _that_ _was a little unexpected._

“That’s it, I need a drink,” Martha’s mother said. 

“Tea, or something stronger?” Tish asked.

“I’ll decide when I get there.” The rest of the Jones family, other than Martha, made a quick exit to the kitchen.

Meanwhile, the Master and the Valeyard were still going at it.

Finally coming up for air, the Master murmured, “You were… it reminded me so much of Gallifrey.”

“Liked what you saw, then?” she replied teasingly.

“Might carry you over to that sofa and show you just _how much_ I liked it.”

“Save it for when we’re back on the TARDIS,” she said, and went back to kissing him.

All of that blatant affection brought an odd ache to Jack’s chest.

_Oh for fuck’s sake, you’re not jealous!_

Still, his eyes couldn’t help drifting over to the Doctor he knew, the one who was standing there in utter horror at the sight of his future self resurrecting the dead, vaporizing an entire alien invasion, going full Tinkerbell Vader on the Prime Minister, and then making out with the updated model.

 _To be a slice of bread in_ _that_ _sandwich, though… I wouldn’t object._

“Doctor, are you all right?” Martha asked, going to his side.

The question seemed to snap the Doctor out of his shock. “The Valeyard,” he said through clenched teeth. “You’re the Valeyard.”

The Valeyard turned to look at him, stepping out of the Master’s arms. “Yes.”

“You lied.”

“Didn’t lie, just omitted.”

“What does that mean, ‘Valeyard’?” Martha asked.

“He’ll explain it to you later,” the Valeyard assured her, “but right now, the Doctor and I need to talk. Alone. Martha, go see to your family.”

“Is she like me now?” Jack blurted out. “What you did back on the _Valiant—”_

“I don’t know,” the Valeyard admitted. “I didn’t get much time with the Archangel Network either time I accessed it, and last time I didn’t use nearly as much of its power as I did this time. I’m not sure how it stacks up against the Bad Wolf.” She looked at Martha with sympathy. “There’s only one way to find out, unfortunately—die and see if it sticks—but I wouldn’t chance it if I were you.”

Martha appeared to be completely overwhelmed, but she tried to smile. “Well,” she said to Jack, “maybe you’ll have company.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack replied. 

“You’re not _that_ annoying,” she said. The joke fell flat.

Jack knew from bitter experience: if she turned out to be immortal like he was, unable to die, then the day was coming when she would curse that ‘gift.’

He remembered the Doctor’s words only days ago, trillions of years in the future: _“That’s why I left you behind. It’s not easy even looking at you, Jack, because you’re wrong.”_

It would break Martha’s heart… and that heart would never stop beating.

Martha left for the kitchen without another word.

“That was wrong,” the Doctor said once she was out of earshot. “You can’t control life and death like that!”

“Save the lecture,” the Valeyard snapped. “You know as well as I do how many companions you’ve mourned over the years, how many of them have died at your side, how many have died because of _your_ mistakes, and how many times you’ve thought to yourself _‘Oh, if only she’d lived.’_ Think of this as me sparing you a tiny amount of pain. You’ve got more than enough of that waiting in your future.” She looked over at the Master. “If you don’t mind…”

“Come on, GQ, I’ll need help deactivating the paradox machine,” the Master said to Jack, heading for one of the TARDISes.

He followed, staying as alert as he could. This was still the Master, after all; there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t try some kind of double-cross, even if he couldn’t kill Jack.

“So what do you need me to do?” Jack asked once they were inside the Doctor’s TARDIS and had shut the door behind them.

“Nothing. I only brought you in here to give them some privacy. I have to concentrate to figure this out, so just stand there, look pretty, and shut up.” He started dismantling the cage around the console.

 _Pretty?_ “Didn’t you build it?” Jack asked sceptically.

“Yes,” the Master replied, sounding annoyed, “but the further back I go, the hazier the memories get. I’d rather not rely on the Little Drummer Boy’s frenzied recollection of an engineering project that could blow up this entire solar system if it’s handled wrong.”

“I’m shocked that you care about this solar system.”

“You're right: I don’t. But _she_ does.” He began shifting various bits of machinery around.

“And since when do you care about what the Doctor wants?”

“Since always,” he said. “It’s just that sometimes I cared because it meant there was something I could ruin.”

“But not anymore, judging by what you were up to out there.”

He smirked. “We found other things to ruin instead. Carnage is much more fun when you’ve got someone to share it with.”

Jack wasn’t sure which was more improbable: the Doctor trusting the Master to this extent, or the Master trusting the Doctor at _all._ “What happened?”

He sighed happily as he pulled a fistful of wires out of the center of the console. “A common enemy brought us back together.”

 _Back_ _together?_ “You’re talking like you’ve been in love with the Doctor since the beginning.”

The Master wrinkled his nose in disdain. “Not the term I’d use.”

“Infatuated. Obsessed.”

“Closer to the mark. We all have our share of problematic favourites, after all.”

The face of John Hart drifted to the front of Jack’s thoughts. “I guess you’re right about that.”

The next few minutes passed in silence. “So here’s what I don’t understand,” Jack began.

“Oh, _do tell,”_ the Master replied sarcastically.

“Back on the _Valiant,_ she killed him.”

The Master grinned. “I know. That was fun to watch.”

“She killed _your past self.”_

“I know!” he cried in delight. “Though not entirely,” he amended. “The Pandorica is the ultimate prison: it won’t even let you escape by dying.” He looked Jack over with a smirk. “Something I know you have plenty of experience with.”

“Wouldn’t he just regenerate?”

“It won’t let him do that either. We do technically die during regeneration—a very teeny bit—so he can’t do it. That thing will keep him alive indefinitely, parked at the very end of the universe.”

“But when the universe ends, the Pandorica will be destroyed and he’ll _die.”_

“I know!” the Master replied, still far too upbeat.

“Which means that _you’ll_ die—or, rather, you’ll never exist.”

“Not an issue with a paradox machine.”

“But the second this is turned off, it won’t matter. You’ll vanish.”

“I wasn’t talking about _this_ paradox machine.”

“What?” But before Jack could press him for answers, the Master ripped out another bunch of wires and the center of the console erupted in a crackle of released energy.

“Let’s go, unless you want a few lungfuls of artron energy,” he said, heading for the exit. “Bet you haven’t died from _that_ yet.”

Jack beat him to the doors of the TARDIS; he had a strong suspicion that the Master would find it funny to lock him in.

_And I don’t know if the Valeyard would stop him._

He shivered.

 _What_ _happened_ _?_

Back in Martha’s flat, the Valeyard and the Doctor were sitting across from one another, talking quietly.

The Valeyard was telling him a story of some kind: “…which is when he used that energy to attack Rassilon, but it pulled him in after them.”

The Master pretended to brush some dust from the shoulder of his jacket. “I’m a hero! Who would have thought?”

“Nothing motivates quite like spite,” the Valeyard said, giving him a fond look. She turned back to the Doctor. “But that was the beginning. The drums were gone; there was a chance to make things better.”

The Master scoffed. “She makes it sound like I had some kind of revelation.”

“We _did_ have a revelation,” she corrected him, her eyes filling with an anger Jack had never seen in the Doctor’s eyes. Murderous. Vengeful. He noticed a similar look in the Master’s eyes: not at one another, but at an unnamed third party.

 _What_ _happened_ _?_

“Why did you pick _that_ name?” the Doctor demanded. “You remember what he tried to do to us!”

“I’m not here to steal your regenerations, if that’s what you’re worried about. But Doctor,” she said, “remember: he was an inquisitor, a prosecutor—”

“A drip,” the Master interjected.

“But he didn’t use the name right,” she continued, ignoring the interruption. “He didn’t follow the meaning. The title means ‘a seeker of justice.’ Now imagine a transgression so horrible that it needed that level of justice imposed upon it.”

“You have no right!” the Doctor objected.

 _“Yes, I do,”_ she hissed in reply. “So do you. There was a time, back when I was you, when I came so close to realising that. For a _single moment,_ I understood: the Laws of Time were a _lie._ It was _all_ a lie.” Her hands curled into fists. “And things had to change.”

The Doctor was nearly as agitated. “Like you changed _these_ events.”

“I didn’t change them as much as you think. Now that the paradox machine is destroyed, things are reset to right before it was activated.”

“So Saxon is still up there?” Jack asked, horrified. “Are the Toclafane still coming?”

The Valeyard shook her head. “Anything that I did with the Archangel stuck: the Master is still in the Pandorica, which is now stored in my TARDIS; all the Toclafane with the exception of the four that he first summoned are destroyed—”

“You could have just sent them back!” the Doctor snapped.

“I didn’t want to,” she said with the barest hint of a shrug. “Then I repaired Martha’s flat and transported everyone here. The last thing I did was burn up the Archangel Network, so now the guards on the _Valiant_ are returning to their senses… and so is everyone else, for that matter. They’ll still have to deal with that quartet of Toclafane, but it’s a UNIT ship, they’ll figure it out.”

“You mean they’ll shoot their guns at it and then die horribly when they realise that their primitive weapons are no use?” the Master asked drily.

“Says the person that was once a guest in a UNIT prison,” the Valeyard remarked.

“Oh, don’t you _dare_ bring that up again!” he retorted indignantly.

“I don’t understand why you’re _still_ upset about the whole sandwich thing!”

The most fitting words Jack could think of for the Master’s current demeanor was ‘a snit.’ “It’s not the sandwich, it’s the principle of the thing!”

“Since when do _you_ have principles?”

“Either get back on topic or get a room, you two,” Jack groaned.

The Master gave him a wicked grin. “Well, you know which one _I’d_ prefer.”

And then he _winked,_ which gave Jack yet another unexpected flashback to John Hart.

_Oh god, do I have a thing for murderous psychopaths?_

Jack dragged his thoughts back to the matter at hand. “What did you mean before: that you weren’t talking about _this_ paradox machine?”

The Master looked over at the Valeyard. “Do you want to tell them, love, or shall I?”

She sighed and stood up, heading towards her TARDIS. “I wasn’t here to fix the paradox machine,” the Valeyard said. “I was here to study it. We’ve built one ourselves and needed this one as a reference point for how to make it more durable across so long a period of time.”

“You’d cannibalise your own TARDIS?” The Doctor snarled.

She opened the door: the interior of this TARDIS wasn’t full of red light, which was at least a small relief. “In a way,” she said, “but not the whole thing: I’m taking bits and pieces from my past selves’ TARDISes." She gestured to the Master, who stepped inside. _“His_ TARDIS is the one that contains it.” She patted her trouser pocket. “I took the dematerialisation circuit out of yours.”

“No!” the Doctor cried. He jumped to his feet, but it was too late to reach them: they were already both inside the Valeyard’s TARDIS. 

The Valeyard turned around for one last attempt at an explanation. “The thing that we’re doing… it has to be done. It’s the right thing to do.” She actually looked _sad._ “I would say that you’ll understand one day… but if we get this right, you never will.” 

She shut the door and the TARDIS vanished, taking the two renegade Time Lords with it.

It was like a reflex now: Jack turned to the Doctor for answers—only to find him sitting back on the sofa with his head in his hands.

“Doctor?” Martha, who had run in from the kitchen when she heard the noise of the TARDIS leaving, got to him first. She looked him over—for a moment, it almost looked like triage—and then sat down beside him. 

The Doctor flinched, but didn’t move away. “Doctor, are you all right?” Martha asked.

“She’s my future… she’s my _future…”_ he whispered, sounding on the verge of a scream. “I save him, like I wanted… but I lose myself in the process…” His voice was choked with tears. “I didn’t want it to be this way.”

“It’s just one possible future,” she said. “Things happened differently here, there’s no guarantee—”

“You don’t understand!” He raised his head to look at her, and Jack saw that the Doctor was actually crying. “The way that she talked… it was like she was talking about the Time War all over again. I never… I hated what I did back then, I _hated_ it, but I still knew that it had to be done. I didn’t regret it, not really. I hated _myself,_ but I would have done it again if I had to. It’s not like… it’s not like the Master, where he really does just enjoy killing—she believed that she was doing the right thing. How is that possible?”

Jack sat down on his other side. “Hey,” he said, putting an arm around the Doctor’s shoulders; a moment later, Martha’s arm joined his. “Maybe she’s wrong, did you ever consider that?” He tried to laugh. “You’re not always right, you know.”

The Doctor’s face still looked light-years away. “Whatever happened to her… I can’t stop it. If there was a way for me to stop it, she would have told me. Instead, she’s tearing up the Web of Time and—oh no. No no no…” His breathing sped up and he began to hyperventilate.

Whatever he had just realised, it was enough to send the Doctor into a panic attack. “Doctor, _breathe,”_ Martha said urgently.

“What is it?” Jack asked.

“The Hybrid,” he managed to wheeze. “She thinks she’s the Hybrid, she’s trying to unravel the Web of Time and… is this because of the Time War? Does she think that using the Moment meant that it was _her?”_

“Doctor, what are you talking about?”

His breaths were still coming in rapid gasps. “There’s a Gallifreyan prophecy about a creature that would stand in the ruins of Gallifrey and unravel the Web of Time. But that doesn’t make any sense!”

“None of this makes sense,” Jack couldn’t help muttering.

“Doctor,” Martha said, “you’re going to pass out if you don’t—”

“And _why is she with_ _him_ _?”_ the Doctor roared.

Jack very nearly smacked himself in the forehead. Of _course._ “Is that what’s bothering you the most?” he asked quietly.

The Doctor shook his head… but then reluctantly nodded. “In 1969, when Martha and I were stuck there because of the Weeping Angels… I ran into him—literally, in fact—and we spent the day together. I didn’t know who he was, I thought he was human, I hadn’t expected him to… but when he did, it felt like…” A sob escaped his throat. “When we kissed, it felt like home. I didn’t know why until now.”

He finally took a deep breath. “For a moment, just for a moment… seeing them together like that, the way they looked at one another…”

“You were jealous,” Martha said quietly, and in those three words Jack heard quite a lot more about Martha’s time with the Doctor than he had known before.

Jack remembered asking Martha: _“You too, huh?”_

He hadn’t realized just how deep that cut went.

The Doctor nodded, putting his face back into his hands. “And I wondered if it had been worth it for her. If it _would be_ worth it, just to feel like I was home again.”

For all of Jack’s wealth of experience with the complicated tangle of relationships and emotions and the knowledge that there were still so many mistakes out there that he had yet to make, so many new ways that he would hurt himself and others… he didn’t have an answer to that.

All Jack and Martha could do was hold the Doctor a little tighter: this confusing ancient being weeping for something that was both a horror and a hope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr artist @bizarrekairaart did an [incredible piece of art](https://bizarrekairaart.tumblr.com/post/625525237178564608/listen-one-of-my-fave-fics-is-hinerdsitscat-s) based on the scene in this chapter where the Valeyard goes all Sparkly Tinkerbell Vader on the Toclafane and aaaaaaaa I am losing my mind over it.


	5. Countdown: Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I’m coming undone before I’m feeling all the rage_   
>  _I’m letting the lions and the tigers out of the cage_   
>  _‘Cause I’m free_   
>  _I’ve got time to kill_   
>  _I’m on a rampage_
> 
> **Setting:** Series 1, Episode 6: “Dalek”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As a heads up, this chapter is a little darker than usual, mostly due to the Master being an evil bastard. (To make up for it, the next chapter will be full of wacky hijinks in San Francisco).

_Ugh, what a creep._

Rose Tyler had a bad feeling about this whole place: the signal that brought them there, the weird museum with bits and pieces of aliens displayed like hunting trophies, the “living specimen” in something called “the Cage”—

Oh, and _every single word out of Henry Van Statten’s mouth._

Which reminded her of another thing: she didn’t like the way that Van Statten brought out a really hostile side of the Doctor.

And then there was Adam, whose name Rose didn’t even know until she asked because Van Statten just kept calling him “English” the whole time. It was even more insulting because Adam turned out to be really sweet: not only did he answer her questions about this place—called the Vault, apparently—but he also asked her about herself, her family, when she was last in London… he was really easy to talk to.

_I can’t remember the last time I got to be the one answering questions instead of just asking them._

He told her a bit about himself: how he was recruited by Van Statten’s people a couple months back (“he has agents all over the world looking for geniuses”), how his job was primarily acquiring and studying any artifacts that seemed extraterrestrial in origin, and how he was apparently very _very_ good at it.

“Oh right, I forgot: you’re a genius,” she teased him.

“Can’t help it,” he replied with a smirk. “I know how clever I am.”

Rose tried to hide a laugh. “You sound like the Doctor.”

She caught the slightest hint of a flinch in his response.

After an awkward silence, he asked, “Are you and him…?”

“No,” Rose said hastily, “we’re just friends.”

“Good.” He was obviously trying to sound casual, but hadn’t entirely managed it.

“Why is it good?”

He looked away, visibly flustered. “It just is.”

_Oh god, he’s sweet on you._

She could practically hear her mum now: _“He’s a bit of a snack, isn’t he, love?”_

Mum wouldn’t have been wrong—he _was_ cute: dark hair and eyes, shy, earnest, a few years older than her but not by much, and oh, that smile of his could light up a room.

Rose tried to drag her thoughts back to the present moment. She wandered around Adam’s workshop, which barely had a single flat surface that wasn’t covered in heaps of _stuff._

But it wasn’t the bits of metal that Adam claimed were from the hull of a spaceship, or the handheld device that the Doctor had demonstrated was a musical instrument, that caught Rose’s attention. 

It was the shelves.

“Your shelves are _floating,”_ she said, moving in for a closer look.

“Well, yeah,” Adam said, looking slightly puzzled. “That’s what anti-grav shelves do, after all.”

“Hold on,” she said with a frown. “Anti-grav shelves? Like, actual anti-gravity technology?”

“What’s so special about that? They barely make the normal ones anymore, not unless you’re going for retro.”

“Since when?”

He shrugged. “Dunno. Decades at this point. AG tech is used for practically everything nowadays.”

 _Shelves that float. That can’t be right._ “And this _is_ 2012, isn’t it?”

“Your questions are getting weirder and weirder, you know.” Adam moved in for a closer look at her. “Are you feeling all right?”

Rose shook her head. “All this tech… it’s far too advanced. It’s only been seven years.”

“Seven years since what?”

“Since my time.”

Now he was just looking at her like she had lost her mind. “What are you talking about?”

“I…” She hesitated.

_Telling him might be a terrible idea… but he looked so miserable around Mr. Van Statten… kind of how I felt at Harrods before the Doctor showed up…_

_Maybe he’d want to come with us?_

“I’m a time traveller,” she blurted out. “I know it sounds mad, but the Doctor, he’s an alien who can travel through time. I’m from the year 2005 and there’s _no way_ for technology to have advanced this much in only seven years!” She looked at his shocked expression. “You don’t believe me.”

Adam looked like he was light-years away. “No, that’s not why I'm…” He ran a hand through his hair. “It’s… it’s the strangest thing, Rose—because I _do_ believe you! The tech thing… I thought it was just alien stuff—people like Mr. Van Stratten adapting technology from other worlds—but there’s more to it than that! I keep running into things that seem out of place, or people remembering parts of history differently—it’s like time’s gone off the rails.”

“Time’s always in flux,” Rose murmured, remembering the Doctor’s words from their (nearly lethal) trip to 19th century Cardiff. “After we’re done here,” she said, “the Doctor will find a way to fix it. He always does.”

“Been with him long?” He sounded oddly suspicious.

“Only a little while, but the things I’ve seen…” She laughed. “...you wouldn’t believe.”

“Is that how you got here?” Adam asked. “He’s got a time machine or something?”

“And it goes to other worlds, too!”

His eyes went wide. “Have you met any aliens?”

“Have I? Loads!”

An idea seemed to occur to him. “Do you think you’d recognize the one we’ve got downstairs in the Cage?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I recognized a few things in the display cases, though. Could we head down and see?”

Adam shook his head. “Mr. Van Statten has access restricted to only a few people… I’m his resident alien expert and he won’t even let _me_ down there. Although…” He gave her a sly grin. “…if you’re a genius, it doesn’t take long to patch through on the comm system.”

She returned the smile. “Let’s have a look, then.”

He tapped a few keys next to a monitor display, which soon broadcast footage of a dark room. Rose could make out a massive console with a bunch of buttons and levers, and something at the far end of the room hidden in the shadows.

She could make out the faintest outline of… 

_Chains. Whatever it is, they’ve got it chained up._ “It’s a dungeon,” she said, horrified.

She heard Adam’s exhale: a hiss through his teeth. “Yeah. Mr. Van Statten wanted to make sure that it wouldn’t escape, at least until he figured out what it was.”

“No wonder you call it a ‘Cage,’” she spat. “It’s cruel.” 

He sighed. “Look, it was here before I even started working for him. I don’t like it either, but there’s not much I can do. If your Doctor is as clever as you say he is, maybe he’ll figure out a way to help it, or at the very least tell Mr. Van Statten how to make it comfortable.”

“As if your boss would ever bother to consider someone else’s comfort,” she grumbled.

Adam was silent for a moment. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I know.”

“You shouldn’t be working for someone like that.”

“Well, until today, I didn’t think there was any other way to see evidence of aliens.” When their eyes met, his were so hesitant… and hopeful.

She could feel herself blushing. “Let’s see if we can fix that, yeah?”

He gave a quiet gasp. “Really?” he asked eagerly.

“Why not?”

He was staring at her like he’d never seen anything like her before—like he was fascinated, which was a weird experience because no one had ever been _fascinated_ by her before. 

_I’m just a girl who worked in a shop. The Doctor’s the fascinating one, not me._

_What if I just—?_

_Oh, for god’s sake,_ _focus_ _!_

“Any chance of getting more light in there?” she asked, hastily breaking eye contact.

“Not until someone else goes in… but since Mr. Van Statten was taking your Doctor to see it, it shouldn’t be long now—oh, there he is.”

The Doctor entered the room alone. Rose watched him speak, but couldn’t hear anything.

“What’s he saying?” she asked. 

Adam frowned and started working on something on another display. “The sound’s on another channel. Hang on, it’ll take me a minute to patch into that too.”

Rose watched nervously as the Doctor kept speaking… and then the lights came up and she saw that it was… a robot? 

_It looks like a pepperpot._

“Do you recognize it?” Adam asked.

“No,” she said. “How do you know it’s alive?”

“Our scanners found signs of organic matter inside of the casing. We’ve never been able to get it open.”

_What's it doing wrapped in chains like that?_

The Doctor bolted for the door.

_Good. He’ll tell Van Statten to let it go, that chaining it up was monstrous, that—_

“Got it!” Adam exclaimed. “Patching in now.”

By the time the sound came on, the Doctor had returned to the captured robot. 

The first sound Rose heard from him was… laughter?

“Fantastic!” the Doctor cried, sounding triumphant. “Oh, fantastic! Powerless! Look at you.” He laughed again. “The great space dustbin. How does it feel?”

“KEEP BACK.” The voice of the robot was… well, robotic, but it also sounded _scared._

“What for?” the Doctor sneered. “What are you going to do to me? If you can’t kill, then what are you good for, Dalek? You’re _nothing!_ What the hell are you here for?”

“It’s called a Dalek?” Adam asked. “Weird voice.”

“Never heard of a Dalek before,” Rose replied, growing worried. This was the angriest she had ever seen the Doctor.

“I AM WAITING FOR ORDERS,” the Dalek replied.

“What does that mean?” The Doctor didn’t look confused, just impatient.

“I AM A SOLDIER. I WAS BRED TO RECEIVE ORDERS.”

“Genetically engineered soldiers,” Adam murmured. “Sounds like a rough life.”

“Well you’re never going to get any,” the Doctor snapped. “Not ever!”

“I DEMAND ORDERS!”

“They’re never going to come! Your race is dead! You all burned, all of you. Ten million ships on fire. The entire Dalek race wiped out in one second.”

“Oh my god,” Rose gasped. A whole species wiped out, all at once?

“YOU LIE!”

But the Doctor still looked furious. “I watched it happen. I _made_ it happen!”

Rose’s breath stopped in her throat.

“Wait, _what?”_ Adam asked, incredulous.

The Dalek paused before continuing. “YOU DESTROYED US?”

“I had no choice.” The way he said it, it was like the Doctor was confessing to breaking a window to get into a locked house, or leaving someone behind at the pub, or… or something _minor,_ not the destruction of an entire species.

“Blimey, what the hell did they do to him?” Adam asked.

“I…” Rose was surprised that she could still talk. “I don’t know.”

“AND WHAT OF THE TIME LORDS?”

“Dead. They burned with you. The end of the Last Great Time War. Everyone lost.”

Adam blinked in confusion. “What’s a Time War?”

“I don’t know,” Rose repeated. “He said there was a war… that he was the only one left… but all he said was that they lost. I didn’t know that he was the one who…”

_He killed two different species at once._

_He_ _killed_ _them._

Since she was talking, she missed what the Dalek said next, but she heard the Doctor’s mocking reply: “Oh, and I caught your little signal: _‘Help me.’_ Poor little thing. But there’s no one else coming ‘cause there’s no one else left!”

“Why’s he _taunting_ it?” Adam wondered.

“I’ve never seen him act like this before.” Rose started shaking her head over and over. “This isn’t him, he’s not like this.”

“I AM ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE.” It sounded brokenhearted.

“Yep!” the Doctor said cheerfully.

“SO ARE YOU,” the Dalek said. “WE ARE THE SAME.”

The Doctor flew into a rage. _“We’re not the same! I’m not—”_ He stopped suddenly and then a horrible imitation of a grin appeared on his face, more teeth than smile. “No, wait… maybe we are. You’re right.” He started backing away from the Dalek.

“What’s he doing?” Adam asked. 

“Yeah, okay. You’ve got a point,” He sounded so _upbeat._ “‘Cause I know what to do. I know what should happen. I know what you deserve.” He paused, as if waiting for the Dalek to guess. _“Exterminate!”_

He went to the console near the door and pulled a massive lever.

“Oh no—” Adam gasped.

The Dalek was wreathed in electricity.

It screamed.

And the Doctor stood back and _watched._

 _“No!”_ Rose shouted, as though the Doctor might be able to hear her through the monitor.

“HAVE… PITY!” the Dalek cried.

“Why should I?” the Doctor snarled. “You never did!” He went back to the console and pulled another level, increasing the voltage.

“We’ve got to go down there,” Rose said, halfway to the door of Adam’s workshop before she even realised what she was doing. “We have to stop this!”

Adam scrambled to keep up. “Sure, I can take you there—even though I’m not sure they’ll let us in—but wait just a second! Rose!”

She spun around to face him. “What?” she demanded.

He flinched. “Look, I know that looked bad, but are you sure that the Doctor wasn’t justified in what he did?”

“How could you say that? He was _torturing_ it!”

“Isn’t this the same person who you’ve been travelling with? I mean, you were just saying that he doesn’t act this way!”

“Because he doesn’t! But he—” Rose could feel a sob building in her stomach. 

_But maybe I don’t know him as well as I thought I did._

“We don’t know what the war was like,” Adam said. “Maybe they deserved it. Maybe they were really that bad.”

“It was _chained up!”_ she shouted. “It wasn’t hurting anyone, and he just…” Her eyes were burning with tears. 

“Let’s go ask him, then,” he suggested gently, putting a hand on her arm.

She shrugged it off. “Not yet. First…” She took a deep breath. “First, we’re going to set it free.”

Adam now looked like he was fighting off a migraine. “Okay… leaving aside the fact that it’s over fifty levels from the Vault to the surface and there are a _lot of armed guards_ stationed on every single one of them, we have no idea what that thing is capable of! If it’s a soldier, it might try to fight its way out. People could get hurt.”

“It couldn’t break out of its chains and it didn’t defend itself from the Doctor even though he was practically on top of it. He even _said_ that it was powerless,” she pointed out. “It needs our help.”

He continued protesting. “I really think we should talk to the Doctor first—”

“No! No, he’ll just… I don’t think he’s being rational about this.”

“It was a _war,”_ Adam said, his voice a little sharper than before. “I don’t think there’s a rational way to react to that.”

 _And how would_ _you_ _know?_ she almost snapped back, but instead took another deep breath. “It said it was created to obey orders. It didn’t have a choice. And now the war’s over.” She looked him in the eyes. “Are you going to stop me?”

He stared at her with that fascinated expression again, before finally shaking his head with a fond smile. “Rose Tyler, you are… well, I guess ‘brave’ covers most of what I mean to say. I’m not sure what the other part is.”

“And here I thought you were a genius,” she joked.

“They didn’t teach classes on dealing with _you._ Come on, let’s go.”

Getting access to the Cage turned out to be surprisingly easy—so easy, in fact, that Rose wondered why Adam hadn’t just taken her there to begin with. All he had to do was flash a badge and claim that he was given special clearance from Van Statten, and then they were inside. 

“It’s bigger than I thought it would be,” Rose whispered. The Dalek was tall enough that Rose could probably hide inside of it.

What kind of thing lived under that armor?

_Not a thing: a person. A living being, so treat it like one. That’s what the Doctor would do._

_I thought._

“My name’s Rose Tyler,” she began. “I’m here to help.”

The Dalek remained silent.

“I saw what they did to you,” she said. “I saw them—him—torturing you.”

“YOU KNOW THE DOCTOR?” it asked. This close, it was surprisingly loud.

“Yes.” _Or I thought I did._ “I travel with him, but I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to help you escape.”

“I AM DYING. MY RACE IS DEAD AND I SHALL DIE ALONE.”

“Don’t say things like that! Come on, I’m going to see if there’s a way to undo your chains…” She reached out a hand—

“Rose, don’t!” Adam cried.

As her fingers touched the Dalek’s domed head, she felt a spark of energy and saw a golden glow in the shape of her fingerprints appear on the metal and then quickly fade.

The Dalek’s voice was now so loud that it made Rose’s ears hurt. “GENETIC MATERIAL EXTRAPOLATED. INITIATE CELLULAR RECONSTRUCTION.”

The chains strained and then broke. One of the technicians rushed in from outside, wielding a large drill. “What the hell have you done?” he demanded, pushing Rose aside and heading straight for the Dalek. It extended a plunger-like implement at him.

The technician scoffed. “What are you going to do, sucker me to death?”

Which is exactly what it did. It was like watching someone be pulled through a straw.

Adam grabbed her arm. “Come on!”

Nodding, numb with horror, Rose followed him past the guards and out of the room.

_This is all my fault._

“I’ve sealed the compartment,” one of the guards said into his radio after they exited. “It can’t get out; that lock’s got a billion combinations.”

“Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to stop it for long,” Adam said, backing away. “We need to go, _now!”_

They took off down the hall.

“Civilians!” another guard yelled as they reached the exit from the Cage. “Let them through!”

They had made it to the lift, but before the doors opened, the lights in the hall flickered and then died, replaced by dim red emergency lights. Guards were suddenly everywhere, swarming the corridor with guns drawn and heading for the Cage while alarms blared around them.

"It's accessed the power grid," Adam said, eyes wide. "Drained it dry. We’ve got emergency power left but that doesn’t include the lifts."

“Are there stairs?” Rose asked. 

He nodded. “This way.”

From behind them, they heard a shout: “Our bullets aren’t getting through. It’s like it’s absorbi—” His voice was cut off by a zapping sound and a shriek.

_What have I done?_

One of the guards—a woman named DiMaggio—was tasked with getting Rose and Adam out alive.

_Why do I have the feeling like it’s not going to matter?_

The rest of it passed in a blur: running down hallways, up flights of stairs—for a moment, Rose thought that the steps would stop the Dalek, but it turned out that it had some kind of anti-gravity mechanism— _faster and faster and faster_ —DiMaggio staying behind to try and hold it off—Rose hearing the horrible _zap_ behind them that signalled yet another death—

_Why did I do that? Why did I try to—_

_Because that’s what the Doctor would have done. He would have tried to help it._

_Why didn’t he tell me about the Daleks? They were the ones who fought on the other side of the war and he never mentioned them._

_Do I know anything about him at all?_

A new alarm started to go off.

“Oh no…” Adam said, just a step behind her.

“What?”

“Up ahead. They’re sealing the Vault to keep it contained.”

She could see the bulkhead lowering. “And we’ll be sealed in with it.”

“Run!” he ordered.

Her lungs were burning. Her muscles were screaming. It had been nothing but nonstop adrenaline ever since they left the Cage and she couldn’t keep it up much longer.

_Please, Doctor, do something…_

But they were too late: the bulkhead slammed into the floor, trapping them both inside.

The Dalek came around the corner, eerily silent.

It was pure instinct: she and Adam retreated until their backs were pressed against the bulkhead. There was nowhere else to go.

_Oh my god, what have I done?_

It stopped only a couple of meters away from them.

_I don’t want to die._

“ROSE TYLER. YOU ARE AN ASSOCIATE OF THE DOCTOR. YOU HAVE KNOWLEDGE OF THE DOCTOR.”

 _Not as much as I thought I did._ “Yes.” She tried to ignore the trembling in her voice.

“THEN YOU WILL BE OF USE. THE DOCTOR WILL OBEY ORDERS OR ELSE YOU WILL BE EXTERMINATED.”

_Don’t let it see you’re afraid._

“All right,” she said, trying to stay calm. “All right, let’s have a chat, then. We can work something out.”

“MOVE AWAY FROM THE SPARE.”

“The what?”

“It means me,” Adam said, his voice shaking with terror. “It only needs one of us as a hostage and you’re the one who knows the Doctor. I’m expendable.”

“No!” Rose stepped in between Adam and the Dalek. “You don’t have to kill him!”

"HE IS OF NO USE. HE WILL BE EXTERMINATED."

_What would the Doctor do?_

_Torture it, apparently._

_No, you can't think about that now. What would the Doctor_ _normally_ _do?_

_He’d be clever. He’d find a way to buy time._

She stood her ground. “You want to find a way out of this place?” She pointed at Adam. “He knows this whole facility inside and out. He can show you the best route.”

“I HAVE ACCESSED THE SCHEMATICS OF THIS INSTALLATION. HIS DATA IS REDUNDANT.”

“It’s all right, Rose,” Adam said. There were tears forming in his eyes. “As long as you make it out… that’s what matters. Don’t worry about me.”

 _“Stop it,”_ she snapped at him, grabbing his hand. “I’m not letting you die here.”

“YOU WILL STEP AWAY FROM THE SPARE.”

“Or what? You’ll shoot me? Kill your best hostage?” she retorted. “Make up your bloody mind!”

“Rose, please—”

“YOUR INTERFERENCE IS IRRELEVANT. HE WILL BE EXTERMINATED.”

“No!” she cried, still gripping Adam’s hand in hers.

There was a zap and a bright light. Rose closed her eyes—

—and when she opened them again, she was somewhere else.

It was a workshop, although not the one she had been in before: this one was less cluttered, with a few boxes on its otherwise-empty shelves, a similar monitor setup to Adam’s workshop, and—surprisingly—a sofa.

More importantly, though: Adam was there with her, and the Dalek was not.

In fact, Adam looked _ecstatic._

“Ha _ha!”_ he cried in triumph. “It worked!”

“We’re alive?” Rose felt like she was still about five seconds in the past. “How are we still alive?”

Adam rolled up his sleeve, revealing a device strapped to his forearm like a gaudy wristband. “Vortex manipulator—cheap and nasty teleportation, but give it enough _oomph_ and it’ll send you halfway across the solar system.”

She saw what he was getting at. “So when the Dalek’s blast hit us, it charged it up—”

“And here we are!” His grin was practically incandescent, which, combined with the rush of adrenaline still burning through her, gave Rose a series of very terrible ideas.

“Well, you did say you were a genius,” she said, then grabbed him by the shoulders and kissed him.

Adam’s response was mostly in the form of a startled squeak.

_Well, I suppose that’s not too surprising. He probably doesn’t get out much._

When she stepped back, he looked at her with wide eyes, then turned away as though he was searching for something. For a moment, he looked overcome with shock, which apparently made him a little fidgety: he ran a hand through his hair, put his hands into his pockets before quickly taking them out again, and stared nearly everywhere except at her. He also looked a little nauseous.

“Sorry,” Rose said, realising a second too late that what she had done may not have been entirely welcome. “I just sort of… er, reacted. Happy to be alive and all that.”

“Why is it always the blondes?” he muttered under his breath.

“What?”

“Oh, Rose Tyler,” Adam said softly, moving in close and putting a hand on her hip. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you for so long.”

She frowned. “What are you talking about?” How would he have known about her?

“You’re brighter than you look, you know. For a human.” He gave her a very different smile. “Pity you’re not faster, though.”

He shifted his hand and Rose felt a stab of pain in her side.

He caught her under the arms as her legs gave way. “Easy now, have a seat.”

“What did you do?” She tried to move her legs, but she couldn’t feel them. Her arms were quickly losing feeling as well.

“Paralysing agent,” he explained as he lowered her onto the sofa. “Not to worry, it’ll wear off eventually… but while we wait, how about we watch some telly together?”

Everything about him had changed. Not his appearance—that was the same—but the way he moved, the way he spoke… all of that wide-eyed innocence was now gone and replaced with this horrid intensity, like hunger only worse.

 _He was playing me the whole time… luring me down to the Cage and tricking me into touching that_ _thing_ _—_

“You’re in league with the Dalek, aren’t you?”

He snorted in disgust. “Not this time. Believe it or not, little Rosie, I’m actually on your side. Yours and the Doctor’s.” He took a seat next to her. “Time for a proper introduction,” he said, pulling a matchbox out of his pocket. “This,” he said, sliding it open, “is the real Adam Mitchell.”

Inside the box was a tiny figure that looked like it might have been the man beside her, only the miniature’s skin was lighter.

“And _I,”_ his impersonator said, tossing the box and its contents over his shoulder like an empty candy wrapper, “am the Master.”

“What kind of name is ‘the Master’?” she scoffed. 

“What kind of name is ‘the Doctor’?” he shot back.

“Someone who took a few more courses than you, mate.”

“Titles,” he said, exasperated. “They’re both titles—Time Lord titles.”

 _Time Lords?_ “He said he was the only one left. He said all the others were dead.”

“Won’t this be a nice surprise, then?”

“Why did you do this to me?” 

“To keep you from doing what you do best, Rose Tyler,” he said. He tapped the tip of her nose with a finger; she could barely feel it. “Meddling.”

“He’s going t’find me, y’know.” She could feel her words starting to slur as the muscles in her face went numb.

“He thinks you’re dead. He’s off grabbing a gun and planning his revenge. All that anger looks good on him, don’t you think? When he goes all Oncoming Storm on lesser beings… ooo, it gives me a shiver. But hush,” he said, pointing a remote control at the display, “this episode’s my favorite one.”

The display lit up with security footage of the Dalek making its way towards what Rose quickly realised was an exit on Level 1. 

_Oh no… if it gets out… they’ll never catch it…_

“If that thing gets free,” the Master said, almost as though she had spoken that thought out loud, “it’ll kill millions. That’s all it’s built for: killing.” He smirked. “I can relate to that. Anyway, isn’t the tension just awful? Who’s going to swoop in and save the day?” 

The Dalek abruptly halted and swivelled its head around to face something behind it. A moment later, the Doctor came into view, holding a futuristic-looking gun that was half as big as he was.

The Master pretended to gasp in astonishment. “Oh, look who it is!”

The volume on the display was too low for Rose to hear what they were saying, nor could she see the Doctor’s expression with his back to the camera, but judging by his body language, he was extremely upset.

_He thinks I’m dead._

The lights on the dome of the Dalek indicated that it was saying something over and over again, in the same rhythm.

The Doctor raised the gun… and hesitated.

Rose couldn’t shake the feeling that, if the Doctor fired that weapon, it would set him on a path that he might never come back from.

He turned suddenly as someone else walked into frame, calmly moving to the Doctor’s side as though there wasn’t a lethal metal monster only a few meters away.

“Whoozat…?” Rose managed to say. It was one of Van Statten’s assistants, the blonde woman with the clipboard who had been following him around.

“That’s another surprise for the Doctor,” the Master said. “Really, I’m so proud of her for staying undercover this long—she’s usually rubbish at it. Most of the time she doesn’t even try to blend in: she just barges into a room and tries to insult the most powerful-looking person there—now, I say ‘powerful- _looking’_ because she could probably rip them apart on a molecular level if she wanted.”

The way the Master talked about that woman, it was like he considered her to be even more dangerous than the Dalek.

He also sounded _turned on_ by that.

If she wasn’t paralysed, Rose would have either shuddered or gagged. Maybe both.

“But now you’re probably wondering: who is she if she isn’t Diana Goddard?” He looked at Rose expectantly. “Yes?”

Unable to move her head, all Rose could do was glare daggers at him. He giggled. “Oh, right, I forgot that nodding became a formidable challenge for you.” He gestured at the screen. _“She_ is the Valeyard: a Time Lord, thousands of years old, and someone who knows the Doctor better than you ever will—better than anyone who has ever lived.”

Having turned to talk to the Valeyard, the Doctor was now facing the security camera enough for Rose to see his expression: one of shock and recognition.

_He knows her._

_Why didn’t he ever talk about the people he knew? Why didn’t he talk about himself at all? If one of my friends died in a war, I’d mention them at least once… right? Especially to someone I spend all my time with._

“She’s known him his entire life. Do you know how old he is, by the way?”

_Nine hundred. He did tell me that._

“He’s nine hundred years old at this point,” he said. “He’s watched civilisations rise and fall—even toppled a few himself. Remember how he said that he killed all of the Daleks and the Time Lords? It took him under an hour to do it, start to finish, all by himself. He’s ancient and deadly and any move he makes shifts the destinies of billions of worlds.”

The word “ancient” wasn't a word Rose associated with the Doctor. He didn’t look it. He looked like someone’s dad or at least like a grumpy uncle.

Although, now that she thought about it, there was sometimes a look in his eyes that was… bottomless. Like they had seen everything there was to see.

And, now that the Master was no longer pretending to be Adam, he had that look in his eyes too: a hint of something impossibly old.

“He might _look_ human, but he’s as far from being a human as you are from being a cockroach.”

Rose wouldn’t have admitted this to the Master even if she’d been able to speak, but she sometimes forgot that the Doctor was, well, an _alien._ Hell, sometimes she forgot that he wasn’t British.

“You will _never_ understand him the way that we do.” The Master gave her a look of disdain. “And why would you? Your feeble human brain would probably melt out through your ears if you knew even half of it.”

_He really enjoys the sound of his own voice, doesn’t he?_

“Of course, that’s why he scooped you up,” he continued. “Because he wouldn’t have to tell you a thing about himself. You don’t tell _pets_ your life story; you give them a treat and a pat on the head and then take them for a nice walk while they shit all over the galaxy’s front lawns. You humans have such short lives and you barely notice anything. You scamper in, make a mess, and he cleans it up. It’s simple. It’s _easy._ He barely has to work to earn your love, you adorable cocker spaniel, with your big eyes and fluffy hair.”

He ruffled her hair in a parody of affection. If she’d been able to, Rose would have bitten his hand off.

_He’d probably just call you a cocker spaniel again._

The Master laughed. “And when he finally manages to get you trained properly, you do something stupid like run into traffic or get rabies—and then he mopes around until he finds a new stray to adopt. He does it over and over again because it’s easier than trying to make friends with people who are actually on the same level as him. Think of all this as an intervention: to people like us, he’s like a sad widow with a dozen cats. It’s so bloody _tragic.”_

Rose could feel tears beginning to burn in the corners of her eyes. Apparently her tear ducts weren’t entirely numb.

 _Pull yourself together, Rose. You know the Doctor. You_ _know_ _him! He doesn’t treat you like this._

“We were friends when we were young, before we went our separate ways, but we’re still connected on a level that transcends any relationship you could ever conceive of, let alone have with _him.”_

The Doctor and the Valeyard were still talking, each of their expressions growing more and more intense and fixated. Even at this distance, Rose could see that bottomless look in his eyes.

_He’s never looked at me like that._

_Come_ _on_ _, Rose, why are you listening to this arsehole? He’s been lying to you all day._

But all the same, she couldn’t keep the fear from eating away at her: _does the Doctor really think of me like a… a…_

_No, that’s stupid. You’re his friend. He views you as an equal._

_Doesn’t he?_

_Then why didn’t he tell me about any of this?_

“Do you want to know who the Doctor really is?” the Master said. “It’s not the fool cracking jokes and looking for adventure—it’s the man you saw torturing a Dalek. It’s the man so powerful that he burned his own world just to rid the galaxy of a few pesky tin pots. It’s the man who _hates_ and _kills.”_

Suddenly, the Doctor’s expression twisted with fury. He turned and fired his weapon at the Dalek, which erupted in a ball of flames and shrapnel.

The Master laughed uproariously. “You’re looking at him right now, in fact! Do you see that rage? That cruelty? That pain? That ruthlessness? And all of that wonderful cleverness holding it together? _That’s_ the Doctor, and we’re here to remind him of that.”

The Doctor turned back to the Valeyard and the two Time Lords began talking, even more intensely than before.

The Master gestured to the screen again. “Do you know what she’s telling him? She’s telling him that this Dalek wasn’t the only one to survive the Time War. She’s telling him where the Dalek Emperor is hiding, vulnerable and weak. And do you know what the Doctor is going to do now? He’s going to go finish what he started.” He giggled. “It’s going to be beautiful. Too bad you won’t get to see it: a battle like that is no place for little human girls. He’ll be going with us instead. Your time together is over… and he won’t miss you at all.”

He leaned in until his mouth was right next to her ear. “Look at her,” he whispered. “She’s even blonde.”

That was what finally did it: the words that finally pushed Rose over the edge of despair and pain. The paralysis was beginning to wear off: she could feel the tears running down her cheeks.

_It’s over. I’m just… I’m just an afterthought._

She remembered their first adventure together, stopping the Nestene Consciousness hiding below the London Eye. Feeling powerful for the first time in her life. Feeling like she _mattered._

_It was a lie, wasn’t it?_

_I’ve got no A Levels, no job, no future…_

_The Doctor made me feel important for the first time in my life._

_But I’m not, am I?_

_I’m going to go back to my mum’s flat and back to working in shops and eating chips with Mickey and doing_ _nothing_ _important because I’m_ _not_ _important at all._

_He just told me what I wanted to believe._

_He didn’t tell me anything real._

“Come on, little Rosie,” the Master said. “I’ll take you home… where you belong.”

* * *

The Valeyard had gone with the Doctor after the events in the Vault were concluded, meaning that the Master needed to pick her up approximately 200,000 years in the future. They had already decided on a meeting place and time, so all he had to do was wait for her in the TARDIS.

He sighed happily as he leaned back against a wall in the console room. That had been _fun:_ going undercover again, screwing with Van Statten’s entire operation, meeting the Valeyard for quick liaisons in various empty rooms around the facility, and waiting for the day when the Doctor would arrive.

And _Rose Tyler._ Oh, that was the best part: befriending her and building up her confidence just so he could tear it all down. He loved burning pretty things for fun. It had been ages since he’d broken someone so thoroughly with words alone; when he dropped her off at her dismal council estate, she looked hollowed out.

It was, well, a _master_ piece. He giggled and reminded himself to tell that joke to the Valeyard when she got back.

Ever since the incident with the Toclafane, they’d barely been able to keep their hands off each other. It was like the power of the Archangel was still there, hiding under her skin like a fire, and bathing in that heat was pure bliss.

And now that they were done with Van Statten, they had plenty of time to indulge in one another’s—

The doors to the TARDIS flew open with a bang… and the being that walked through them was fury incarnate.

 _“What did you do to her?”_ the Valeyard hissed. She closed the distance between them surprisingly quickly.

“All I did was talk,” he said, feeling a sudden spike of fear without knowing precisely why.

“What did you say to her?” she demanded, grabbing the fabric of his shirt in a fist and slamming him into the wall. _“_ _What_ _did_ _you_ _say_ _?”_

His eyes widened. _Oh sh—_

**_CONTACT._ **

Usually, that form of communication needed a certain degree of response before they could connect, but not this time: she entered his mind as brutally as if she had kicked the door down.

He heard a cry leave his throat but that barely mattered because she was _inside,_ tearing through his thoughts like they were tissue paper, ransacking his memories and overturning his senses and for some reason he kept flashing back to that time in Paris where he ordered his minions to fire their guns into the floorboards because _that was exactly what it felt like—_

The memory of his “conversation” with Rose Tyler surfaced all at once—every second of it compressed into a single instant instead of one moment after the other—and the next thing he knew, he was curled up on the deck of the TARDIS, his throat scraped raw from what had apparently been a brief period of screaming.

She stood over him, still glowing with rage, and for a moment he wondered if the time had finally arrived when she, after so many years and so many regenerations and so much conflict, would actually kill him for good.

“How dare you,” she said, her voice quiet but no less deadly.

“How did you know?” he asked, not bothering to get up. If this was really it, then it didn’t matter if he faced death with dignity.

“Before we came here, I told him that she was still alive, and the Doctor wanted to talk to her… to explain things to her. But she screamed at him to leave. She looked—” She trembled. “I shouldn’t have left you alone with her. I should have known that you’d be cruel.”

He glared up at her, feeling his anger returning and chasing away the fear. “What, did you want me to be _nice_ to her?”

She stared back in disgust. “You wouldn’t know the first thing about that. I don’t know why I thought that you would.”

“No, see, that’s the problem: I _can_ be nice! I can make people _love_ me for how nice I am. When I want to, I can be sweet as pie! Do you think people didn’t find Harold Saxon _nice?_ Do you think that Missy wasn’t _nice_ when she greeted all those confused dead souls in the afterlife? And admit it: you trusted O because he was _nice!_ ”

There it was: _there_ was the fury, the inferno that kept him alive no matter what, that let him destroy whole worlds, that drove his hunger. There was the _snarling_ in his chest. “You value being nice over everything else,” he spat. “Even when your regeneration was a complete jackass, you still demanded that everyone around you act _nice_ or else they were _obviously_ the bad guy. No _wonder_ I was able to fool you so many times over the years: you were too busy scolding people for being _mean_ to pay attention to who was _bad!_ We are _not good people,_ either of us! You can pat the head of every little human you meet, save a city or a planet every so often, but at the end of the day we both killed _every single one of our own people,_ and no amount of _smiling_ is going to change that!”

“That’s different,” she snapped. “The Time Lords deserved it. She didn’t.”

“We went to 2012 for two reasons: to send the Doctor off to destroy all the Daleks he could find, both the ones in the Game Station and the ones who show up at Canary Wharf, _and_ to prevent the Bad Wolf. In order to do that, we had to ensure that she wouldn’t stay with him. So I _made sure_ that she would never want to see him again.”

“But that wasn’t why you did it,” she retorted, with a look that was far too knowing for his comfort. “You did it because you wanted to hurt something.”

“And what if I did?” he shot back. “It doesn’t matter— _she_ doesn’t matter! You’re the only person who ever made her even remotely interesting, and it’s the same for all your other pets!” He growled in frustration. “You keep thinking about them like they’re equals and they’re not! You keep showing up and wasting your time on these _flies_ and you’ve thrown away so many of your lives for them like they’re important—”

“That’s what makes them important!”

“Oh, knock off the smug Messiah act! _‘For the Doctor so loved the puny little humans that she kept making stupid decision after stupid decision_ _’_ —although,” he added with a sneer, “there _is_ some truth hiding in all that: you want to be their god! Not just when you were slinging around the Archangel either: you want them to pray to you, to _adore_ you and treat you like the deity that you secretly think you are. You want them to suffer for your sake, you want them to make sacrifices, you want—”

“Stop telling me what I want!” she shouted.

“Someone has to! All the time you’re spending around the Doctors and these _meaningless_ people, you forgot who you’ve become! _You are not the Doctor!_ You went with me to Gallifrey and the Doctor died along with every other Time Lord when you became the Valeyard!”

“And you think _you_ haven’t changed?” she snarled. “All these versions of your former selves and now you’ve regressed back to your old habits—”

“What, killing?” he asked with a snort.

“No: _showing off.”_

“I’m always showing off.”

“But now you’re showing off for _me_ again. To get my attention, like you used to do. Why are you bothering? You’ve already got my attention!”

“I’ve already got _you,”_ he scoffed. If she was so convinced that they were back to their old dynamic, then why not stick to the same script?

“Then why do you keep acting like you _don’t?”_

He flinched. He hadn’t expected her to say that—in fact, what he _had_ been expecting her to do was kick him off the TARDIS, possibly in pieces.

She exhaled, some—but not all—of the fury bleeding out of her. “There’s no separating us now. We’re practically a fixed point. So why are you acting like I’m about to pop off like a Weeping Angel the next time you blink? We fought each other for centuries and now I’m _here_ and we’re on the same side! What more do you want?”

He didn’t know. He felt like everything had paused, objects hanging in midair, waiting to drop. 

_What more do I want?_

_What if the answer is “nothing”?_

“I’m not used to… winning,” he admitted as he got to his feet.

She snorted. “If you think this is ‘winning,’ then I think you’ve grossly misinterpreted the situation we’re in.”

“Have I got you?” he asked, surprised by how vulnerable those words sounded.

Everything remained stuck in midair while he waited for her to answer.

She took another deep breath and finally seemed to _look_ at him, even though they had been yelling directly at one another for the past few minutes. “Yes,” she said at last. “You’ve got me.”

Relief was not the response he expected to feel, but the rush of it nearly knocked him over again. “If I’ve got you,” he said, “then any other victory is inevitable.”

He wasn’t sure which one of them moved first: all he knew was that they were so close together and there was a fire under her skin and her mouth was so warm… 

_There’s no separating us now…_

When their lips finally parted, the Valeyard angrily jabbed him in the chest with a finger. “Don’t _ever_ do that sort of thing again. Do you understand me?”

Her expression was not one that invited an argument. “All right. Fine.”

“And stop acting like an arsehole just because you can. It’s not funny and it’s not impressive.”

He couldn’t help bristling a little at that. “If this is another one of your attempts to reform me like you tried to with Missy—”

“No, it’s because I’d rather not be utterly furious with you half the time,” she interrupted impatiently. “It’s distracting, for one thing.”

“We get distracted all the time.” He leaned in to kiss her again, but she dodged.

“Not like this,” she said. “If we’re spending all of our time fighting with one another, we won’t be able to finish the plan. And the plan is the most important thing.”

He nodded, feeling the shudder of that fire returning. Their revenge— _justice_ , she called it—burned so hot inside both of them that it was almost more than could be controlled.

“Speaking of the plan,” he said, “what’s next on the list?”

“San Francisco, 1999.”

An idea started forming in his mind. “That’s the easy one, isn’t it?”

She shrugged. “Straightforward, at least: steal a beryllium chip and keep your former self from breaking into the TARDIS. Why do you ask?”

Remembering that encounter now, it all felt so _surreal._ What had he been thinking?

 _Ugh, and what was I_ _wearing_ _?_

“I think we could use a change of pace,” he explained, “so let’s have some fun with it. The paradox machine is stable enough now for our activities before the War, at least on Earth, isn’t it?”

“As much as it can be under the circumstances.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why?”

“It means that we’re more or less consequence free. All of this will be undone when we take the final steps.”

She looked uncomfortable. “If you think of it that way, then _anything_ we do will be without consequences.”

“Of course.” Why did she look so disturbed? 

_Oh no._

“You do realise that, don’t you?” he asked carefully. “Giving Ada that leg up, or giving River a new set of regenerations, or even sending your past self to destroy the Dalek Emperor… once we’re done, none of that will ever happen. Both the bad and the good.” He stroked her cheek. “So why not indulge in a little rampage or two?” 

She still didn’t look satisfied. “Even if it’s all undone,” she said, “the things that we do to others along the way still matter.”

“No, they don’t. They _really_ don’t.” That was a truth she had never been willing to acknowledge: some people were important and some people _weren’t._ Certain people had to live in order to make the future happen, but other people wouldn’t be missed because they would never do anything significant. Even if there wasn’t a paradox machine, they could both go on a killing spree of epic proportions without damaging the timeline because there were so many people out there whose survival wouldn’t matter. Not like the two of them: either of their deaths would have disastrous consequences for the universe. They were important—they had _always_ been important—but almost all of the humans she met were not. Interchangeable parts, really. Cut one down, and another one takes its place.

_Why can’t she see that?_

He paused for a moment to think of a way around this. “If it makes it easier for you to stomach, how about this: on this trip, _you_ be the Master. Scare the pants off people. Barge into a gala and take hostages—”

“I did take a hostage the last time we were there,” she pointed out. “It was just myself.”

He couldn’t help smiling at the memory of _that_ incident. “You know what I mean. Make some reckless decisions. Burn something down.”

She looked at him warily. “Other than it obviously being something of a turn-on for you, why are you suggesting this?”

_As if I need another reason?_

Still, there was _sort of_ another reason: “Because you need to practice letting go. If we do this right, you won’t get to have any more pets. Your sentimentality about these humans might ruin the whole plan.”

“I’m not killing anyone while we’re in San Francisco.”

“Come on, not even one?” He sounded petulant but he didn’t care at the moment. “I’m sure you can find at least one human who deserves it. What about the ones who shot you?”

“No,” she said firmly. “But I’ll wreak some havoc, how about that?”

He sighed. “It’ll have to do.”

“And, to make it fair, while I’m off being you, _you’re_ going to be the _Doctor.”_

It took him a second to realise what she meant by that. “Oh, come on! Why?”

“Because I know that the first thing you’re going to do when we get there is try to get my past self out of his clothes and into your arms.”

“And I take it you draw the line at screwing yourself?”

“Always have.”

He knew he was sulking. “This is so unfair.”

The Valeyard rolled her eyes. “I’ve noticed your attempts to snog every one of my regenerations like I’m some sort of Pokemon, you know.”

“A very sexy Pokemon.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Is that a sentence you _ever_ thought you’d say?”

“Not really, no,” he grumbled. “But anyway, what’s the harm if I get a little fun in while we’re travelling? It’s still _you,_ isn’t it?”

She laughed. “I’m not doing this because of any objections on my part. I’m just doing this to drive you mad.”

“And you called _me_ cruel,” he muttered.

“Oh, I haven’t even _begun_ to be cruel to you,” she whispered as she leaned in to kiss him. “Just you wait.”


	6. Interlude: All the Good Girls Go to Hell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR “THE TIMELESS CHILDREN”
> 
> _There’s nothing left to save now._
> 
> **Setting:** Series 12, between Episode 6 (“Praexus”) and Episode 7 (“Can You Hear Me?”)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi fam! So the Series 12 finale just aired a couple days ago, and I had to make a decision: do I incorporate The Reveal into this fic somehow, or do I disregard it and proceed as if The Reveal was something else?
> 
> Much to my surprise, “The Timeless Children” didn’t actually contradict much of what I’ve written and planned (though I’ll discuss one sticky bit in the notes at the end of this chapter), so I found a way to both work it into the story, tell a piece of the background story for this fic, and differentiate the Doctor/Master’s relationship in this fic from the one they have in canon. It also let me nail down the exact point where this AU diverged from canon.
> 
> Hope you enjoy it!

_“I’d tell you more, but... but why would I make it easy for you? It wasn’t for me.”_

The Doctor played the message over and over, watching every shift in the Master’s expression like there was a code hidden in the pixels, one that she could crack if she only worked hard enough to decipher it.

_“I had to make them pay for what I discovered. They lied to us.”_

It was his use of “us” that frightened her the most. He was so quick to play the victim, to make everything about himself, to view everything through the lens of him versus someone else—and usually that “someone else” was her.

But “us” implied a shared trauma, a shared grievance. He never shared _anything,_ especially with her.

_“They lied to us.”_

But what was the lie?

How could she learn the answer?

The thoughts in her head spun. As he said, taunting her in his message, there was no longer an easy way to find out: even a TARDIS as remarkable as her own couldn’t cross dimensions—it had barely managed to make it to Gallifrey.

There were other ways: ones that were colder, crueler… ones that she vowed she would never use… but they were there.

Or she could run again. Leave this place, leave the question behind, and go back to her everyday life a little sadder, a little more shattered… trying not to feel so alone or afraid, doing her best to pretend to be happy… 

_I don’t have to know everything._

The Founding Fathers weren’t the only ones who could lie. She lied to herself all the time.

 _“Rule One: The Doctor lies,”_ River once said.

The Doctor went back to Gallifrey over and over, her curiosity finally overwhelming her fear of what that knowledge might do to her. 

But there wasn’t an obvious path forward. Not without involving someone else—and while she was verging on desperate, she wasn’t yet desperate enough that she would stoop to tampering with the memories of someone who trusted her.

_Wait._

Something else that the Master said: _It’s buried deep in all our memories._

Every single Time Lord, walking around with a tiny shard of the answer inside of them.

Every Time Lord.

Even the ones who were long gone.

She started keying in the coordinates, silently praying that there was a location inside the Citadel that still had enough space for her TARDIS to land.

* * *

This place held almost as many memories for her as the Matrix itself.

Few of them were pleasant memories.

Did the Master expect her to come here? Did he expect her to wander through the ruins of the home she had been so desperate to leave?

He probably did. In fact, looking back on his actions during the mess with the Kasaavin, he had probably planned to capture her and show her his handiwork personally. A little guided tour—she could imagine the monologue now… 

A perverse part of her mind was impressed. His carnage had been thorough… almost precise.

That gave her a moment’s unease. The Master was many things, but _precise_ wasn’t one of them, at least when he was enraged. His anger made him sloppy.

In fact, the more she looked around, the more she wondered if he had done this all on his own.

In fact—

Her mind slammed the door shut on that possibility.

However, having to push it away in the first place was almost as frightening.

_Rule One: The Doctor lies._

_That’s exactly what I’m doing right now. What I’ve been doing for ages._

_The answer was right in front of my face. I had all the evidence I needed, I knew what they had done, but I didn’t believe them._

_I already knew the answer. I just didn’t want to know the reason._

She couldn’t stop herself from approaching the Matrix: the repository of all Time Lord knowledge and memory.

She hooked it up to the TARDIS’s telepathic circuits—no need to risk losing herself inside the Matrix—and, taking a deep breath, closed her eyes and connected.

_Brace yourself, Doctor… this is going to hurt._

Billions of Time Lords, millions of years, and an almost infinite number of memories… how could one possibly navigate this?

 _Come on, old girl,_ she whispered to the TARDIS, _take me where I need to be._

The TARDIS complied, using its navigation circuits to guide her mind through the chaos… back and back and back… to the very beginning.

To an explorer finding an abandoned child at the boundary to another dimension.

To a happy childhood, one where the child played and learned and never had a single thought about the dimension she left behind. A childhood where she never thought she might be anything but ordinary.

But tragedy struck (as it would strike over and over again, inescapable for her, like a stormcloud following always behind) and then everything changed.

She was dying… and then she was reborn. A new face and a new voice and a new chapter in her life.

It was not a pleasant chapter.

* * *

Perhaps it was easier to tell the story like this:

_Once upon a time, there was a little girl who was lost in the woods alone. She was found by a friendly traveller, who took her home and raised the girl as her own child._

_The girl and her new mother were happy. The mother loved the little girl, and the little girl loved her in return._

_But one day, the girl was careless and cut herself on a sharp rock. Her mother ran to her when she heard her daughter’s cries and discovered a most peculiar thing: instead of blood, the little girl bled pieces of gold._

_Perhaps someone else, a different mother, would have bandaged the girl’s wound and eased her pain. But that would be a different story: a much shorter one… and a much happier one._

_The mother’s greed was a vicious thing, and the possibility of gaining such riches was too tantalising to pass up._

_She began to prick the girl’s finger with a pin, every so often, and gathering the gold dust that she bled. For a time, the mother was happy, and so the girl was happy as well and did not mind the little pains._

_But then the mother’s greed returned and she began to cut the girl’s arm with a tiny knife and gathering the gold nuggets that tumbled out. And, for a time, the mother was happy, and so the girl was happy and did not mind the slightly larger pains._

_But then the mother’s greed returned, and she stopped calling the little girl her daughter._

_The knives grew larger and the cuts grew deeper and the girl bled torrents of gold constantly and the pain was more than she could bear._

_She thought it would go on forever._

_But forever is a tricky thing. Something might last forever, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t change._

_One day, the woman who had once been her mother discovered a way to create gold without her._

_Perhaps it was finally over, the little girl wondered. Maybe this was the day that things would go back to the way they used to be, when she was safe and warm and happy._

_Instead, the woman cut out the girl’s tongue so that she could never tell anyone else her secret, and threw her outside into the cold._

_And the secret remained a secret, but the little girl never stopped hurting and she never stopped running._

_She is still running now, in fact._

* * *

The Doctor watched and remembered.

She remembered being lost and then being found.

She remembered being safe and then being in pain.

She watched the person she trusted change into someone unrecognizable. She watched the way that the bright spark of interest on Tecteun’s face morphed over time into cold clinical cruelty as she forced her to regenerate over and over again, trying to claw the secret to eternity out of her genetic code. At first, Tecteun tried to minimise whatever pain she could and apologise for the pain that she couldn’t. She would sing her to sleep and hold her when the fear was too much… but that tenderness faded, replaced by silence and frustration until Tecteun stopped talking to her entirely.

Regeneration was not easy and it was not painless. It was the opposite of painless, in fact: the body’s desperate act when the alternative was even more painful. It averted death by being as close to death as possible: that final moment of terror and pain right before the silence ensued. 

Only with regeneration, there was no silence. No peace. Just pain and fear and _survival._

Tecteun would perform her experiments and then would switch her off like a light.

She was just a specimen, after all. Not a real person. A mystery to be solved and then resealed, over and over again.

And, finally, when she thought it would be over because Tecteun had gotten what she wanted, they still had more uses for her.

_They did this to me._

Nothing of herself belonged to her: her body, her memories, her choices—

 _They_ _did this to me._

If it had just been the experiments, she might have been able to let it go as just one person’s cruelty. Except that it wasn’t: even after Tecteun had gotten what she wanted, the Doctor had been a tool for the Time Lords to use. She endured more lifetimes than she could count at the hands of the Division and the constant memory wipes and shattering of her identity and thoughts to the point where she forgot her own name because no one had ever spoken it.

No wonder she rarely remembered who she was after regenerating.

**_They did this to me._ **

She felt herself trembling. She felt like she was going to burst into flames.

She wanted to smash something. She wanted to destroy something. She wanted to watch it burn.

She tried desperately to get some measure of control over herself.

_Take a deep breath, Doctor—_

She cried out as a memory cut across her mind like a knife made of fire:

_“You are the only one who believes that these efforts have any merit,” the older man said, looking around the laboratory in obvious disgust. Not because of the acts performed, not because of the silent child strapped to the examination table like something on display, but because of the wasted resources. “Our willingness to support your project is growing thin, Doctor.”_

_It might have been comforting if Tecteun’s expression had shown any vulnerability, or a trace of something other than that cold intensity. But even to those that she presumably considered “people,” there was no warmth in her._

_“I’m close,” Tecteun insisted. “I had a new result with the samples yesterday. All I need is more time, just a little more patience… I’m so close, Lord President.”_

_His eyes briefly flicked over to the child. “Is the specimen in danger of damage?”_

_That was when Tecteun smiled. “I told you before: it can’t be killed. That’s why it’s perfect—and why it’s so important to unlock that quality in its genetic code.” Her expression was more teeth than smile. “And once I do, we’ll never have to worry about ‘patience’ again. We’ll have all the time in the world.”_

_The man mirrored her expression. “See that you do. Great changes are coming, but we cannot wait forever.”_

_“As I said,” Tecteun said, “soon we’ll have all the forever we desire.”_

_“Very well. I’ll leave you to your work, Doctor.”_

She inhaled sharply as the memory receded.

_I used it… when I chose my name I used her—_

_No. It’s not hers. I made it my own, I gave it its own meaning. She doesn’t get to dictate my identity anymore, it doesn’t matter what she—_

But it was a lie: it mattered. Every time she thought the word “Doctor,” all it did was overwhelm her senses with unbridled rage.

There was no promise to be found in that name. No solace, no refuge.

Nothing but pain and fury.

_Who am I now?_

It was the question that she had spent her whole life asking and never quite answering.

But she already knew the answer. It was right there in front of her face.

The name she had been running from for so long. The promise she never thought she would make. The path she never thought she would walk.

_The universe doesn’t need a Doctor anymore. It needs a prosecutor. A judge. An executioner._

_It needs justice. Cold, merciless, uncompromising justice._

_So, Doctor, I let you go._

_It’s time for a new promise._

The Valeyard disconnected the TARDIS from the Matrix and considered her next act.

_What happens next?_

_Oh… I know this one._

Her fingers moved over the TARDIS controls as though she was in a trance, sensing the push and pull of time and space, fumbling for the right destination.

_Come on, old girl… take me where I need to be._

_Take me there in time to do something about it._

_Take me there._

_Take me_ _then_ _._

She opened the door to the TARDIS and looked out at the same location she had left but in a different time: the Matrix room, before Gallifrey was destroyed.

And there stood its soon-to-be destroyer: the Master, his dark eyes burning with impossibly far away constellations—galaxies living and dying in flames.

_He must have just found out as well._

“You,” he snarled. He was angry, but didn’t seem especially surprised to see her. “All this time… it was _you.”_

“Aren’t you going to ask why I’m here?” she said, stepping out of the TARDIS and joining him by the Matrix.

“Did you come to rub it in my face?” He was visibly seething. “The smugly superior Doctor, somehow even _more_ special… you couldn’t just be the saviour of Gallifrey, could you? Of _course_ you ended up being its genesis as well!”

Red began to creep into the edges of her vision. “I didn’t want this,” she snapped.

“You always acted like you were different,” he sneered. “Like you were better than everyone else.”

 _How dare you. How_ _dare_ _you make this all about yourself._

She felt herself beginning to tremble as she spoke. “You must have seen what Tecteun did. What the Time Lords did. What the Division did. Do you really think that my being ‘different’ was a good thing?” She wondered what would happen if she just started strangling him. “They lied to _all_ of us, and I’d appreciate it if you took your head out of your ass for a single moment and understand what that actually _means!”_

The Master paused. The fury in his eyes was slowly tempered by a hint of curiosity.

“So I’m the Timeless Child.” The words felt like they were scorching her lips. “Do you think that really makes things _better?_ What, that the ability to regenerate is from my genetic code? That I’m much older than I thought I was? That I apparently tumbled through some portal from another universe?” Her hands balled into fists at her side. “It didn’t give me _anything_ but agony and trauma!”

He snorted derisively. “Oh yes, _poor you.”_

“You of all people should know what this means!” she spat. “You of _all people_ should understand what I’m feeling right now!” She reached out and grabbed him by the chin, using her other hand to tap her fingers on the side of his head in that old familiar rhythm. “Remember that?” she demanded. “Remember those drums? Remember when you discovered that they had shoved them into your head as a child? Remember how much you wanted to destroy them? How much it _hurt?”_

He pushed her away. “As if I wasn’t already having a _fantastic day,”_ he growled. “What’s your point?”

“My _point_ is that you’re so wrapped up in your own little resentments that you aren’t seeing what’s right in front of you! Do you really think that I could watch all of that and not feel anything but utter _rage_ at the ones who did this to me?”

She moved back into his personal space. “Do you see this?” she said, glaring into his eyes. “Do you see where I am right now? Do you see what’s bursting out of me _right now?_ I am _nothing_ right now but pure unending  _hatred_ _.”_

He inhaled sharply but said nothing more. 

"Look at us,” she hissed. “They made us both into tools. They took us _—children—_ and warped us into tools and weapons… and then told us we were crazy when we wondered why our lives didn’t make sense and told us we were weak when we felt the pain of their cruelty. Do you, _at last,_ understand what I am trying to say?”

Something flared in his eyes, something burning just as hot as her own fury. “They tortured us. They tortured both of us.”

“Yes.”

He was silent again, but it was as if she could feel the heat of his anger on her skin.

And, for the first time in so long, she didn’t want to shy away from it.

“We’re the same,” she said.

_That’s what you’ve been begging me to admit all along, isn’t it?_

“I never thought it would happen,” the Master whispered, now looking at her like she was something utterly impossible.

“What?”

“There’s finally someone I hate more than you.”

She wasn’t sure whether to laugh in surprise or sigh in exasperation, but before she could decide, he leaned in and kissed her.

_Oh._

_Should I pull away? Or pull him closer?_

_Well, it isn’t as though my day could get any_ _more_ _surprising._

She opted for the latter.

It felt a bit like a victory for someone, but she couldn’t figure out which one of them had won. 

_Perhaps we both did._

This place did not hold many pleasant memories for her… but it did hold a few:

_They ran down another alley, heedless of how utterly ridiculous they looked: two young people, still believing that just because they couldn’t see anyone meant that they were invisible._

_Too reckless, but it never stopped them before._

_They finally stopped running, and stood together breathlessly, hand in hand. “How long do you think before Borusa notices that we snuck out?” Not a question born from worry, but from the smug glee of feeling so very clever._

_Koschei smirked, leaning in close. “Long enough to do this.”_

_His lips were so warm; it was like there was a fire hiding inside of him._

She clung to that memory as hard as she clung to him right now. It was one of the few things in her life that didn’t feel like a lie.

_Back together at last. Just us._

But she could enjoy this more fully later. Right now, there were still things that had to be done.

“I know that you want to destroy Gallifrey,” she said softly, “but you can’t.” Before he could argue the point, she held up a finger to silence him, trying not to laugh. “Not by yourself.”

A brief flash of uncertainty in his eyes gave way to understanding. “Do you mean…?” he began.

She smiled again, though the expression was feeling less and less like a smile and more like baring her teeth. “I have a few ideas on where to begin.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phew! The Eighth Doctor’s chapter is up next, I swear.
> 
> I mentioned in the notes at the beginning of this chapter that there was one spot in this story that “The Timeless Children” made a bit awkward, and it’s this: if the Doctor doesn’t _actually_ have a regeneration limit, why did the Master go to the trouble of passing the Eleventh Doctor a new set in Chapter 3? Since the show itself doesn’t really answer the question regarding the events in “The Time of the Doctor,” I decided to handwave it a bit as “Eleven believes that he’s on his final regeneration, and because the Master does kind of have to tell him that he’s working with one of the Doctor’s future regenerations, he needs an explanation for it, since Trenzalore is unlikely to happen this time around.” 
> 
> There are a few lines scattered here and there in the rest of the fic that I might tweak a little at some point, but none of it really detracts from the story so it isn’t especially high on my list of priorities.
> 
> A Request: I imagine that many people have Opinions on how the finale went, but I’d appreciate it if we kept the ranting in the comments section to a minimum. 
> 
> Thanks!


	7. Countdown: Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Waste no worry for the world_   
>  _Let it be a tragedy of love and glory_   
>  _While they wait by gates of pearl_   
>  _We'll be building palaces in purgatory_   
>  _Oh dear, let me see those smoky eyes_   
>  _‘Cause you're a villainous thing and we can't have you living a lie_
> 
>   
> **Setting:** The 1996 television movie

_Oh… it’s Puccini… Madame Butterfly..._

She was in a dress, a blue dress, a lovely color under all the white, like flowers in the snow.

He was pleading with her, something about his breathing, and she argued with him about his heart—his hearts?—but she was wrong about something, terribly wrong… 

Whatever the right words were, he didn’t know them: “Timing malfunction… the Master… he’s out there…”

He heard another voice, a different one, saying, “Somehow, I don’t think his name is Mister Smith.”

_Smith…_

Then something went wrong.

“Clear!”

Terribly wrong.

“Clear!”

 _Lethally_ wrong.

“Clear!”

Over and over again… so loud and piercing… and then nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing but the cold and the dark and a box.

Then something changed: he saw blue again. Like her dress, like the box, the blue box… the blue lightning now flashing around him, coiling, twisting his features, his skin, his _everything._

It didn’t leave him: the blue was still there but now it was inside of him instead of around him.

_This isn’t the right box, it’s too cold, it’s too small, it should be bigger on the inside…_

_Out out out get me out, get me out of this place, help, it’s so cold, I don’t know who I am…_

It passed in a blur: hammering his way out of the box, the eyes of fear in front of him, now just another body on the cold floor, everything so cold, _Madame Butterfly,_ the lightning now back outside of him, so loud, so cold… 

_Where am I? What happened to me?_

He was in a new room now: this one wet, still cold, so loud, his breath coming in gasps, clutching at a thin sheet of fabric wrapped around his waist, faces everywhere… reflections of reflections of reflections of a terrified face that he didn’t recognise, but was on every surface… 

_Who am I?_

He saw those faces all around him, shattered by lightning.

He couldn’t keep himself from crying out: _“Who am I???”_

“Well, you don’t have to _scream_ about it.”

He turned. It was a voice that was not his own and a face that was not his own, but this one was not a reflection.

The person who spoke was sitting—almost lounging—in a broken wheelchair and wearing a dark tailcoat, matching shirt and trousers, a brocade vest, a top hat, and a very wide grin.

_Is that me? No, I’m the other one._

He shivered and pulled the sheet tighter around him.

“Easy now,” the man said, standing up and moving towards him, “you’ve had one hell of a day.” Looking him over, the man asked, “What do you remember?”

He tried, he really tried to remember. “Puccini… _Madame Butterfly._ Then everything went cold. Cold and blue—” He gasped. “A blue box! I remember a blue box!”

The man’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Good! Good, what else?”

“I… nothing. I can’t remember anything else.” He felt so lost… he felt like he was going to sob. “Do you know me?”

It was like those dark eyes were looking _into_ him. “I know you so well,” the man said softly. 

Their faces were too close, everything felt too close.

He flinched back so violently that he nearly stumbled.

“Shhh,” the man said, grabbing his arm to keep him upright. “Careful… I’ve got you.”

“Who am I? Who are _you?”_

“My name’s the Doctor.” The man smiled; it was reassuring. “Your name is John Smith. You’re my companion.”

 _Smith… companion… Doctor…_ yes, that all sounded familiar. “What does that mean: companion?”

“It means you’re with me. Through all of it.” The Doctor’s grip on his arm tightened and he looked at John with sympathetic eyes. “You must be soaked through. Let’s find you some clothes.”

John nodded and let himself be guided back into a room that was warmer and drier, full of little doors that held all sorts of clothes.

_Shouldn’t they be bigger on the inside?_

“Where is it… where’s it gone…” the Doctor muttered as he went from door to door. “Ah, here we are.” He held out an outfit: a dark green velvet coat, a white button up shirt, a grey cravat, and beige trousers.

As John unwrapped the sheet, he noticed out of the corner of his eye that the Doctor was staring at him. “What’s the matter?”

For a second, the Doctor looked flustered—but that expression was quickly overridden by one of alarm. “You’ve got something on your chest.”

John looked down and saw a wire sticking out of him, right over his heart.

“Easy… easy now,” the Doctor said—it was only then that John realised how quickly his own breaths were coming. He pointed at the nearby bench. “Sit,” he ordered.

John obeyed and tried not to look at… at whatever had happened.

There was a pain, one that made him briefly cry out, and then it was over. He looked down and saw the primitive-looking wire coiled in the Doctor’s hand.

John couldn’t bring himself to speak above a whisper. “What happened to me? What was I doing in this hospital?”

“It only looks like a hospital.” The Doctor grimaced as he tucked the wire into his coat pocket. “It’s actually a research laboratory, one where they perform experiments on sentient beings.”

“What kind of experiments?”

The Doctor looked away, as though trying to remember something (John could sympathize). “They’re… they’re trying to create a hybrid.”

 _Hybrid._ Something about that word resonated inside of his mind… not the same way that the other half-remembered thoughts were stirred up, but instead something less solid, more ephemeral… and which filled him with a nameless dread.

“What did they want with _me?”_ he asked hesitantly, standing up and pulling on the shirt the Doctor handed him.

But before he could do up the buttons, the Doctor took his hand and placed it over John’s heart… and then moved it over to the right side of his chest.

_Two hearts._

“What am I?” he gasped.

“You’re half human, John. That’s why they wanted to study you.” His fingers interlaced with John’s own. “You poor thing… you must have been in agony…”

He was doing that thing again… staring at John like he was looking _into_ him.

_“I know you so well…”_

Two hearts… four heartbeats… 

Four beats, over and over.

_Conta—_

This time, it was the Doctor who flinched back, almost tripping over the bench to get some distance between them.

“Are you all right?” John asked. Something had happened— _nearly_ happened—but he couldn’t figure out what. He reached out a hand, but it was quickly swatted away.

 _“Fine!”_ the Doctor said sharply. “I’m fine! Hurry and finish getting dressed: we need to get out of here. We’re both in grave danger.”

John still felt like he was coming unstuck in time, but scrambled to get dressed as quickly as possible. After buttoning up the shirt and putting on the trousers, he started looking around for something to put on his feet.

“What are you doing?” the Doctor asked.

“Where are my shoes?”

The Doctor blinked in surprise. “Shoes…” He began searching the area as well. “I could have sworn that there were shoes…” He exhaled impatiently. “Well, it can’t be helped now. Let’s go.”

 _Easy for him to say,_ John grumbled silently to himself. _He’s not the one who has to worry about stepping in medical waste._

“Who are they?” he asked as they made their way out of the hospital—no, not a hospital—and into the damp night air. “The ones running this place?”

“Just pawns,” the Doctor replied, sounding distracted. “The person pulling the strings is an old enemy of mine: the Master. He can possess other bodies, even humans, but the human hosts don’t last long before decaying.”

 _The Master…_ something about that name was familiar as well, but he couldn’t puzzle it out any further due to the pit of horror that had opened in John’s stomach as he considered the implications of what the Doctor was saying. “Does he know about me? About what I am?”

The Doctor looked uncomfortable. “I’ve tried to keep you hidden. But since he went to the trouble of having you captured and brought here, I think it’s safe to assume that he does—which is why we need to leave.”

John looked back at the building they just left. It looked so much like a normal hospital. “I can’t have been the only one in there. We have to help the people who are still trapped!”

“Your safety is more important.” The Doctor started walking faster, but John grabbed him by the sleeve to stop him. 

“We can’t just leave them. We need to stop this Master before more people get hurt!”

The Doctor’s expression twisted in frustration… almost anger. “You’re always doing this—why are you _always_ doing this?” he demanded. “For _once_ in your life could you just think about _yourself_ instead of total strangers who will never be grateful enough to match what you’ve done? Why can’t you just _walk away?”_

John was stunned into silence. He didn’t understand why the Doctor was so upset, but there was something else… something he could almost remember… something so close that it was on the tip of his tongue. 

But it remained tantalisingly out of reach.

“Because I can’t,” was all John managed to say.

He watched the Doctor rein in his temper. “Of course you can’t,” he murmured, seemingly to himself, with the slightest hint of a smile. “You never could.” He sighed. “All right, we’ll work out a way to stop him. But first: shoes.”

* * *

_This was a lot of trouble for one stupid paper bag._

He rode in an ambulance, filled out paperwork, sat in a waiting room for way too long, practically mugged one of the doctors, and all Lee managed to get out of it was… a paper bag full of junk.

The last twelve hours had been a _joke._

It was a dumb move, being out in public in broad daylight, but he didn’t care. No friends, no family—everyone he cared about dead from pointless gang warfare—and now he had been reduced to what was basically pickpocketing.

If Lee thought about it as anything other than a cruel joke that the universe was playing on him, he’d have jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge by now.

 _What_ _do_ _I do now?_

Lee reviewed the contents of the bag again: a pocketwatch, a yo-yo, a metal wand that he _really_ hoped wasn’t for some weird sex thing, and a key.

The key might be worth something—or at least might unlock something that contained something valuable, like a safety deposit box. It didn’t look like a house key, although even that would have been a good thing to have, since he really needed to lay low for a while.

_Though with my luck, it’ll be the key to a magic shop._

But it didn’t matter anyway: since the old man didn’t have any ID on him, Lee wouldn’t be able to find the place.

Maybe he could pawn the watch.

 _Wait, hang on… the blue box. Maybe_ _that’s_ _what the key opens._

It would mean going back to the alley where he lost his last remaining friends, but it wasn’t like he had anything better to do with his time.

He turned around and collided with a woman in a gray coat. 

It wasn’t his finest moment: Lee jumped in surprise, swore in the lady’s face, and then fell over.

“Whatcha got there?” she asked. She didn’t seem annoyed, just _really_ nosy. Judging from her accent, she was English.

“Just some junk.” He got back on his feet.

“Rubbish bin’s over there.” She pointed to her left.

“I’m good, thanks,” he said, and made to leave. 

The woman stepped in his way. “I really wouldn’t go back there if I were you,” she cautioned him.

She couldn’t have _possibly_ known where he was going… but Lee couldn’t shake the feeling that she _did._ “None of your business, lady.”

And once again, she was in his way. “Some… shall we say… very _sketchy_ people are watching that alley. You’re better off doing something else.”

“Leave me alone,” he snapped. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

She gave him a grin that was more teeth than smile. “I’m the Master. Now hand over the bag.”

He couldn’t move. It was like he was frozen in place.

Well, almost frozen: his arm was moving, holding out the bag, which she snatched out of his hand and stuck in her coat pocket.

“I went to a lot of trouble to get that stuff,” he complained, suddenly able to move again.

The lady—the Master, apparently—looked thoughtful for a moment, and then nodded. “You _did_ go to some trouble, didn’t you? So how about this: I owe you one.”

Lee snorted in derision. “Fat lot of good that’s going to do.”

“Tell me what you want, then.”

“A million bucks,” he said drily.

“Oh, you’re just precious, you are,” she said, looking on the verge of laughter. “What would you do with it?”

“Spend it.” _Duh._

“On what?”

He was beginning to get pissed off. “Why do you care?”

“Because you’ve obviously had one hell of a day.”

“Have you been following me or something?”

“Of course I have,” the Master said casually, as though stalking random strangers was a totally normal thing. “You were running from a rival gang, you got stuck in an alley, your friends were shot, and then a really impossible thing happened that saved your life but killed a stranger, and you’ve spent all the hours since then trying to find a way to make it all mean something.” She locked eyes with him. “So, Lee, I’ll ask you again: what do you want?”

She knew his _name._ She’d _followed_ him. She saw what happened in the alley and at the hospital, and knew _way_ too much about what he was thinking right now—

And she looked almost as pissed off about it as Lee himself felt.

“Revenge,” he said quietly. “I want revenge.”

“Lucky for you, then,” the Master said, giving him that weird grin again. “I’m _brilliant_ at revenge.”

* * *

_Oh, this is going to be a disaster._

He had planned everything out: where he would be waiting, how he would introduce himself, the story he would spin for the Doctor about what had happened and who he was… but when the moment finally arrived he _barely_ managed to keep himself together.

He was prepared for Grumpy Eyebrows, Bowtie, and Specs (though he sadly missed his chance with Leather Jacket). With them, he had been fun and flirty and about as charming as he could manage… and that had all gone out the bloody window the moment that the Master looked into those maddening blue eyes and nearly ruined the whole plan then and there.

For pity’s sake, they’d almost created a telepathic link, which _really_ would have ruined everything because it was _extremely_ difficult to lie through it, especially to someone like the Doctor.

It reminded him so much of the first time that he saw her most recent regeneration in the Outback, back when she thought he was MI6’s resident alien conspiracy theorist. He’d taken one look at her and almost confessed to everything.

At least _then,_ there had been stakes. There had been a plan for how to deal with her and a really immediate series of goals, and although he still had a plan in _this_ case, he also had free time and nothing to do with it except distract the Doctor.

Which was why he had decided to have a little more fun with it than the Valeyard knew about—only now he was walking through San Francisco with this beautiful barefoot _menace_ who kept _looking_ at him and ruining his concentration.

Losing his wits wouldn’t have mattered except that one of the _other_ Masters was running around the city as well.

 _Ugh,_ _him_ _._

He didn’t remember a lot about that period of his life and, even now, it was something he preferred not to think about. The only thing that lingered in his memory was the hunger: the all-consuming hunger for one more second, one more breath, one more touch…

_Funny that we both died that day. Daleks and humans… we should have known they’d be the death of us._

But it was temporary. It was always temporary. Even the powers of Death obeyed him to an extent. 

He was too hungry to die. Yes, he remembered that part. 

The other things he could remember, though, were mostly cringe-inducing. Those _clothes._ The _pronouncements._

_“I need the Doctor’s body.”_

He struggled not to cackle at _that_ memory. 

_Oh, that’s hilarious._

_And… well, still true._

He remembered this Doctor as being pretty, even through the fractured perception that he had at the time. They met again years later, when the Master had a more stable form (though much less hair), and he was still nice to look at even then… but oh, this one, newly regenerated and so vulnerable, with his eyes so soft and his lips parted just a little bit… 

_I still need that body._

_Don’t giggle, don’t giggle, he’ll want to know why you’re giggling…_

And even more challenging was the fact that _he_ had to remember to be the Doctor and that meant adhering to some sort of code where he had to be nice to the little humans and not just instinctively follow his hunger and boredom.

 _But if it means that the Valeyard is getting a taste of what_ _that’s_ _like… it’s a fair trade._

Because that was the other plan: she’d slip, just a little, realise that he was right, and then they wouldn’t have to argue anymore about whether they were doing things the _right way,_ and he could feel the way that he felt when they destroyed Gallifrey, only he’d get to feel it all the time now…

_The two of us, burning together._

But _this one,_ this infuriating man, still had that half-suicidal stubbornness about saving everyone but himself, which meant that the Master now had to come up with some kind of imaginary problem to solve so that the Doctor could feel warm and fuzzy about helping these stupid _flies._

His fingers itched for his tissue compression eliminator, but he’d left that with the Valeyard, hoping that she would actually use it. In its place, he had her sonic screwdriver (“I can pick up the one belonging to my past self if I need it,” she said at the time).

_What am I supposed to do with this, assemble a cabinet at someone?_

Even mundane screwdrivers could take out an eye if wielded properly. This one was worse than useless.

But it didn’t matter anyway: using the sonic was a risk, as was anything that might jog the Doctor’s memory enough for him to remember who he was.

Fortunately, thanks to the cover story, anything that the Doctor found familiar could be easily explained away as things he had seen as a “companion.”

They wandered around for a few hours, first to find a shoe store to break into (which he was rather proud to have accomplished without the sonic screwdriver), and then to follow a series of “leads” that the Master was making up as he went along.

He had to admit, it _was_ rather fun pretending to be the quirky know-it-all showing off for the naive “human.” Well, “human-ish.”

But now he needed to come up with an activity. On the plus side, there were two other Time Lords running around San Francisco at the moment, and one of them was bound to have come up with something he could interfere with.

Good thing that lying came as easily to him as breathing.

That Hybrid excuse, though… he really shouldn’t have mentioned that: it only complicated matters and didn’t add anything to the story, but the wire sticking out of the Doctor’s chest really _had_ unnerved him and it was only then that he remembered that the Doctor would probably notice the whole “two hearts” thing, so he reached for an explanation that was little more than grasping at straws.

 _This is going to be a_ _disaster_ _._

“It’s a funny thing about the clothes,” the Doctor said, seemingly out of nowhere.

“The what?” the Master asked, startled out of his silent ruminating.

“What we have on, I mean. It’s a bit fancier than what everyone else is wearing.”

He shrugged. “Well, we’re a fancy couple.”

“Couple?”

“What?” _Oh dear._

“You said ‘couple.’”

The Master’s hearts started beating like mad again. “Did I? Oh. I just meant that, er, we’re both well-dressed.” He tried to laugh but it mostly manifested as a nervous giggle.

He didn’t think it was possible for him to be so terrible at maintaining his cover. He was the same person who spent _years_ as a mild-mannered MI6 analyst—why was this particular Doctor _so damn distracting?_

At this point, he wasn’t even sure he could pretend to be _himself,_ let alone someone else.

“Is that a bullet hole?” the Doctor asked, indicating something on the Master’s shoulder.

“Is that what?” he asked, before remembering what had happened the last time he wore this outfit. Well, might as well indulge in some of the Doctor’s characteristic name-dropping: “Ah, yes, I remember now. We went to a technological exhibition in London in 1834, only there was a bit of a misunderstanding when we arrived: the Master showed up with a very clever—but _extremely_ wicked—plan to capture me, and there may have been a _bit_ of a firefight, because Ada Lovelace—first computer programmer, surprisingly good with weapons—started shooting a steam-powered automatic gun at him, only the sights on it were a little off, so I took a bullet in the shoulder. You were brilliant, by the way: chucked a grenade at the Master and gave us an opening to escape with Ada.”

The Doctor stared at him in astonishment for a few seconds. “And you _forgot_ about that?” he finally asked incredulously.

“Typical sort of day for us, John,” he replied with a grin. “Now come on, I bet we’ll find something down by the piers.”

“Why do you think that?”

The Master rubbed at his beard briefly while he tried to come up with an answer. “Well, it’s New Year’s Eve, isn’t it? Who would be down there on a day like this?”

“People with boats?”

“People up to no good, that’s who!” he proclaimed as if the Doctor hadn’t spoken. “There are probably whole sections of the area that are empty right now. It’s the perfect place to hide out and make a quick getaway. I have a sneaking suspicion that whatever the Master’s planning, he’ll be hiding it down there.”

_Worst case, we push a few shipping crates into the water and call it a day._

_And then start making plans for how we’re going to spend the evening…_

_Don’t_ _giggle_ _, damn it!_

* * *

“I thought we’d be grabbing guns or something,” Lee said, still confused over what exactly was going on and what he was _doing,_ “not redecorating a garage.”

“You want revenge, right?” the Master asked. 

Lee didn’t know where she’d found all of that computer junk, but there was a lot of it—enough to cover at least three of the crates that she was using for a workbench.

“Yeah,” he confirmed. “So why are we doing _this?”_ He rapped his knuckles on one of the large sheets of metal propped up against the wall of the abandoned warehouse they had broken into.

“Killing’s easy,” she replied. “Shoot someone: bang, they’re dead.” She paused and shrugged. “Usually. At any rate, their problems are over.”

“And this is somehow better?” Lee didn’t bother to disguise his sarcasm. Half the time, she didn’t even seem to notice it.

“Or worse, depending on your perspective.” She strapped on a set of goggles and got out that wand thing.

“What _is_ that?” he asked.

“Sonic screwdriver,” she said.

“Sonic?”

“Sound-related,” she said. Apparently she had pressed a button, because it started emitting a weird sci-fi kind of squeal. “See? Makes noise. Sonic.”

“Does it do anything other than make that noise?” Lee asked.

“Sonic _screwdriver,”_ she repeated, a little impatiently. “What do you _think_ it does?”

“Slices, dices, and makes julienne fries?”

The impatience was replaced by a grin. “Oh, you’re a cheeky one, aren’t you?” She brandished it again. “You know, I did try cooking with it once—accidentally created a _very tiny_ black hole when it was supposed to be bouillabaisse. It really ruined the CERN holiday potluck.”

She wasn’t great at staying on topic, Lee was beginning to notice. He crossed his arms over his chest. “So what _are_ we doing?”

“Oh, did I not mention that part?” the Master asked. 

His temper flared. “No, you didn’t! All you did was hand me a bunch of wires to carry around, and now I’m sitting here twiddling my thumbs while you’re busy building a whatever-that-is. If this is your way of ‘making it up to me,’ you're doing a pretty lousy job so far.”

She stared at him in silence and, for a second, Lee thought that he had offended her, which he now realized was probably a dumb move. But a moment later, she pulled off her goggles and nodded. “Ah. Yes, I suppose I can see why you’re upset.” Her expression brightened. “Right: explanations! I love a good explanation. So, as I said before, killing’s _easy,_ but not especially _satisfying_ revenge. A better tactic is to make them feel the same way you felt. Tell me, how’d you feel when they were after you?”

Lee almost automatically replied “nothing,” because that’s the answer you were supposed to give in these situations. That or “pissed.” Anger was usually an acceptable emotion, but he didn’t really see how making his friends’ killers _angry_ was going to count as revenge.

It clicked: “Scared,” he admitted. “It was like I was a mouse being hunted by a cat or something.”

The Master looked thrilled with his response. “I thought so! And that’s what we're going to give them: _that_ fear, _that_ feeling of being hunted.” She turned back to her work, but her smile had gotten weird again. “It’s not quite empathy… it’s every bit as cruel, though.”

“How is that cruel?”

Lee watched her fingers tighten on the screwdriver. “It hurts,” she said, “and doesn’t help the other person one bit. It just puts more pain into the universe.”

He was still skeptical. “Then why do people talk about empathy like it’s a good thing?”

“They think it means compassion,” the Master said. “It’s not. You can empathize with another person’s suffering, but that doesn’t mean that you want to help alleviate it. Sometimes you want something else.”

Lee was pretty sure that she wasn’t talking about _his_ problem anymore.

_I think I might be in over my head._

Her thoughts returned to the present moment. “But like I said: what we’re planning isn’t empathy. This is more like… emotional contagion. A virus. And we’re intentionally infecting them.” She held up the piece of metal she had been working on. “I jury-rigged a Cyberman’s emotional inhibitor into an emotional _inducer_ —crude, but effective. You know that feeling you get when someone’s following you? When you’re being chased but can’t see where they’ve gone?”

Lee nodded.

The Master was practically bouncing with enthusiasm. “The second they step into this warehouse, their amygdala and hypothalamus will start going into overdrive. Cortisol and adrenaline, flooding their systems, triggering a fight-or-flight response. Breathing and heart rate increase, pupils dilate, digestion slows to a crawl, hearing and peripheral vision diminish… nothing left but sheer animal terror. In short: it’ll scare the pants off them.”

By reflex—maybe his own fight-or-flight response—Lee backed up a step. “Are you sure this isn’t a little… extreme?” he asked nervously.

She froze and, without saying a word, slowly set down the screwdriver. Lee, meanwhile, had a nonstop stream of silent profanity going through his head at the possibility that he just pissed off someone who was way more dangerous than he first thought.

“There was a family once,” she said at last, looking like she was on the other side of the world. “They were after me for ages, trying to steal something from me. I could have dealt with them easily, but I wanted to give them a chance to do the right thing, so I hid instead of fighting. Then they attacked a school… those students were just little boys, _children,_ trying to be brave.”

Lee didn’t know what she was trying to tell him.

_Children, trying to be brave, she said._

_I know the feeling._

“That family was willing to kill just to extend their own lives… so I made them immortal. Wrapped one in chains, tossed him in a pit. Trapped another in a mirror, turned a third into a scarecrow. The last one I chucked into the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy. They’re all alive, but by now I bet they wish that they weren’t.” The corner of her mouth twitched into something that looked amused. “And that was back when I was considered a _merciful_ person.” She gestured to the pile of electronics in front of her. “So Lee, believe me when I say: they’re getting off easy.”

Lee shuddered. She wasn’t lying; he could tell that the way he could tell when he was standing too close to the edge of something far too tall. 

“Lady, remind me never to piss you off.” He tried to make it sound like a joke, but he could hear his voice shaking in a way that he really hoped she hadn’t noticed.

But at this point, he had no idea what was going on in her head. The way she was talking, Lee wasn’t even sure if she was _human._

Especially because he was pretty sure that humans didn’t smile the way that she did.

“Oh, Lee,” the Master said cheerfully, “you don’t have to worry about that.” She pulled the goggles back down over her eyes. “This time, you’re on the right side.”

_‘This time’?_

_Yeah, I’m definitely in over my head._

* * *

The Master resisted the urge to use his cravat as a makeshift mask to block out the rank odor of damp wood and fish. 

_Maybe I should have picked somewhere a bit less… smelly._

For his part, the Doctor didn’t seem to notice the stench. He kept looking around the rows of dilapidated warehouses and salt-crusted wooden crates as though he was window-shopping on Christmas Eve. Meanwhile, the Master had to keep making up clues and then standing back while the Doctor’s imagination ran wild with possible explanations. 

Of course, none of those explanations ever seemed to include the possibility that he was being shamelessly lied to about what was going on.

_Typical Doctor—anything short of a full-on confession with visual aids wouldn’t break through that shell of oblivious optimism._

Even the Valeyard retained that tendency, though the Master really hoped that they were about to near the end of _that_ particular problem. 

_Spare me another lecture on kindness to animals._

Though that wasn’t even the primary reason for his latest attempt at corrupting her. What really drove this impulse was greed: every moment that her attention was on one of those irrelevant flies was a moment when her attention wasn’t on _him._

It wasn’t a particularly noble reason, but when had he ever cared about that sort of thing?

_We are not good people, either of us. The sooner she admits it, the better._

His mind conjured up the fantasy of the two of them back on the TARDIS, him kissing smoke off of her skin while she whispered in his ear: _“You were right.”_

“Have you noticed the problem with the power lines?” the _other_ subject of his fantasies asked.

“The what?” the Master asked, slightly disoriented as he was jarred from his thoughts. 

“The power lines,” the Doctor repeated, pointing up at the electrical wires strung from warehouse to warehouse. “There aren’t very many, are there?”

“Yes, very curious,” he said, stroking his beard in thought as he silently tried to figure out what the hell the Doctor was getting at.

“Any operation the size of what you’ve described would require loads of electrical power—far more than any of these cables could draw upon.”

The Master silently cursed as he realised that this line of “investigation” might be about to end sooner than he had planned. “Well, you must remember, John—”

For a moment, he noticed the slightly lost look in the Doctor’s eye when he said “remember.”

_Ooo, bit insensitive._

He continued: “—the Master is not human. He is likely using technology that is not of this planet or time period, which would have very different energy requirements than what you would normally expect from this area.”

“Hmm…” the Doctor said, considering the new possibility. The Master had to admit, he always did enjoy watching that mind going to work trying to solve a problem. “Then we should probably keep a closer eye out for signs of alien technology… oh!” His eyes widened. “Perhaps he’s drawing power through a source that we can’t see from here.”

“Perhaps!” was really all the Master could say in reply. At this point, the wisest course of action was to step back and let the Doctor talk himself in circles for a bit.

He still preferred the nose-scronching thing that the Valeyard’s face did when she had a breakthrough, but the wide grin that this version of the Doctor had was nearly as cute. “It must be _underneath_ the pier!” He started excitedly removing his jacket. “We should be able to spot it if we climb down—” He took off towards the nearest edge of the pier, where there was a rusting metal ladder leading down into the water. 

The Master did his best not to groan out loud. Of _course_ the Doctor would decide to do something messy and inconvenient. “Instead of throwing yourself into the water and hoping for the best,” he suggested, picking up the Doctor’s coat and doing his best to dust it off, “you might consider finding a way to head down via the shoreline instead.”

Secretly, his suggestion was mostly due to the fact that he didn’t want to deal with a Doctor who smelled like the aftermath of nearly-drowning, which he almost certainly would if he had gone with his original plan.

_Although… if he’s sopping wet, he’ll have to change clothes…_

But before the Master could amend his suggestion, the Doctor was already halfway to a spot between piers where he could make his way down the bank. He turned back to face the Master. “Aren’t you coming?”

He winced. “Not a fan of the water. I’ll hunt around up here.” He fixed the Doctor with an expression that was facetiously stern. “Don’t go getting yourself killed, all right?”

The Doctor smiled and the Master could feel his own hearts beating just a little faster than before. “I suppose it wouldn’t do for me to end up in hospital again, would it?”

_You absolute menace._

_Count yourself lucky that you’re not within range of a good snog._

That infuriating man continued on his way, leaving the Master alone and slightly lightheaded.

“Right,” he murmured to himself. “Time to wrap this up.” While the Doctor was distracted, he could cobble together a fiendish-looking device of some kind—ideally something explosive. Then they could blow it up, grumble over “the Master’s” wily escape, and then find somewhere to enjoy the rest of their time in San Francisco.

Everything else could sit by the wayside: without the beryllium chip, the Doctor’s TARDIS couldn’t travel anywhere; without Lee, the Master’s former self couldn’t access that TARDIS; and without being able to access it, the heart of the TARDIS wouldn’t open and the Earth wouldn’t be destroyed.

So he could enjoy himself free of guilt… not that he felt guilty about anything normally.

_The Doctor is going to be a bit upset when he finds out I tricked him, though._

_Hopefully I’ll be gone before that happens._

He tried to focus again: there was plenty of metal around here, probably some fuel as well, and enough spots where he could work unobserved. 

As he walked around the pier, trying to find an ideal location, the Master couldn’t help sensing something a bit… weird. 

There was already non-human technology nearby, he realised. 

He hadn’t anticipated that, although in retrospect he should have: his former self would have needed _some_ sort of backup plan if he couldn’t find Lee, and since they were the same person and had similar thought patterns, it would stand to reason that they would both would find this area of the city suitable for a base of operations.

It wouldn’t be a complete disaster if his past self and the Doctor encountered one another, but it would throw in some complications that he would rather avoid. 

_Maybe I can just club him over the head with something heavy._

_An_ _actual_ _screwdriver would have come in handy as well._

He opened the door of the nearest warehouse, and there _she_ was: the face he liked best—especially the way it was at the moment, which was surprised and exasperated. 

“What are you doing here?” the Valeyard demanded. 

He tried to look innocent. “Just wandering around.”

"Wandering around?" she repeated.

"Yes, I was _wandering around!"_ the Master insisted. It was technically true, after all.

The Valeyard crossed her arms over her chest. “Thwarting my plans?” she asked.

“Thwarting your plans?” he echoed.

“Are you?”

“No.” He wilted a little under her sceptical expression. “Well, not intentionally—I was thwarting _a_ plan. I didn’t realise it was yours.” He peered over her shoulder at the sheets of metal lining the walls. “What are you doing in there?”

She did her best to block his view. “Wreaking havoc. Now scram.”

The Master couldn’t help emitting a growl of frustration. “We’ve got to do _something:_ apparently the only way to distract your past self is to make him think that there are humans that need saving, so it’s either this or attempt to evacuate an entire post-op ward at the hospital.”

“Should I even ask?”

“Probably not,” he sighed, then grinned. “Want to find somewhere to make out instead?” There was no reason why he couldn’t occupy himself in more than one way.

But, as expected, the Valeyard rolled her eyes. “You had _one job_ while we were here: distract the Doctor and keep your former self from mucking things up. Do you even know where _he_ is?”

“Probably sulking outside the TARDIS. He doesn’t have a key this time.”

“You want to thwart something? Go thwart _that.”_

He finally managed to get a better look inside the warehouse. “Hold on… is this a dimensional engineering setup?”

The Valeyard mimicked his earlier expression of innocence. “Is it?”

“You’re building a transdimensional space inside a shed?” he asked incredulously.

“Am I?”

“Are you sure you know what ‘wreaking havoc’ means? It’s not a synonym for ‘arts and crafts.’”

She smirked. “It is if you’re doing the macrame right.”

Apparently the Doctor wasn’t the only menace in the area at the moment. “I can’t even tell if you’re insinuating something,” the Master complained. “Is it possible to be both aroused and confused at the same time?”

“You’re confused more often than I am,” the Valeyard teased. “You tell me.”

“I almost preferred it when you were self-righteous,” he said grumpily. “Come on, you can’t give me even a _little_ hint about what you’re up to?”

Mercifully, she acquiesced: “I’m doing Lee a favour.” 

For a moment, the Master wanted to get out of sight, in case the young man turned up and saw him, but then remembered that Lee wouldn’t have recognised him anyway. “Where is he now, incidentally?”

“Trying to find a lorry that will move a TARDIS. There are a few things that I need if I’m going to finish this up before tonight, and I don’t have time to trek back up north.”

In spite of himself, he felt a little disappointed to have missed seeing Lee again. For a human, he hadn’t been too bad. “What’s this favour you’re doing for him?”

She gave him a wicked grin. “Revenge.”

That look in her eye… it was a look he recognised, burning with the fires of the ruined Citadel. 

_We are not good people, either of us._

“Ooo,” the Master breathed in growing delight. “You’re having fun, aren’t you?”

“Might be,” she said; her face revealed surprisingly little. “But not if you’re hanging around distracting me.”

“My distractions are always pleasant!” he protested, feeling a bit offended.

The Valeyard snorted with laughter. “I’ll tell you all about it later. For now: get a shift on.”

He gave her a quick kiss. “Remember the promise you made about tonight.”

“That part’s already prepared,” she reassured him. “Don’t worry.”

“I never worry.”

The expression on her face before she shut the door indicated that she didn’t entirely agree with that claim.

She was unfortunately correct, the Master conceded privately as he walked away. He was running out of ways to keep the Doctor occupied and he felt like he was one wrong move away from ruining the whole thing. If the Doctor remembered who he was, things would get uncomfortable very quickly, and the odds that the Master could fool him into believing that they were the same person would grow increasingly slim.

For the moment, however, the Doctor still believed that he was John Smith, and this plan might still work out if the Master kept him distracted by other things.

The question was _how._

“John Smith,” meanwhile, had returned from his trip under the pier with only his shoes and the cuffs of his trousers muddy. “I checked as far as I could before I reached the waterline,” the Doctor said, sounding a bit discouraged, “but most of the conduits I found didn’t even have power running to them.”

“It was worth a look,” the Master consoled him. “Any detail could have been a clue.”

“What about you? Did you find anything up here?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” he admitted grimly. “I detected traces of an energy signal in the area, but it’s degraded. The Master’s moved on somewhere else.” He sighed in frustration. “Damn it!”

The Doctor’s jaw set in a determined expression. “We’ll find him. We tracked him this far: someone who’s that disturbed is bound to make a mistake eventually.”

The Master fought back the kneejerk reaction to defend himself. 

_Not the time for ego._

_Hmm… I might be growing as a person. Interesting._

“You’re right, John,” he agreed. “We’re dealing with a very clever enemy, but unlike us, he’s on his own.” He flashed the Doctor a grin. “We’ve got each other. Always have.”

To his satisfaction, the Master noticed a slight blush on the Doctor’s face. “I should have said before,” he said shyly. “Thank you for saving me from him.”

“Of course,” the Master murmured, not really trusting himself to speak in anything louder than that. It wasn’t often that he was thanked for anything, much less by the Doctor, and it had unbalanced him all over again.

“Are you hungry?” the Doctor asked eagerly. “I think we passed a few restaurants on our way here. Feel like dinner?”

The Master nodded, still feeling a little off-balanced by the way that the Doctor was looking at him. “That sounds brilliant,” he said. 

All he wanted was the Doctor’s attention, as usual, and now he had it.

_For now… but what happens when he wants to play hero again?_

A solution finally occurred to him: the Doctor had a pathological need to save other people.

So why couldn’t that “other person” be him?

“Wait,” the Master said, before the Doctor could start walking. “There’s something I haven’t told you.”

The Doctor turned to him, alarmed. “What is it?”

“You’re not his primary target.” He did his best to look haunted. “I am.”

* * *

Lee didn’t entirely understand why the Master wanted him to drive a blue box around (especially since it was somehow in a different location than where he last saw it), and definitely didn’t understand what she was planning on doing with it when he brought it to her, but at least this way he was doing _something,_ which was a major improvement over what he had been doing: namely, sitting in a warehouse and feeling increasingly uncomfortable.

Maybe it was just the emotion-inducer thing she was working on.

From the moment the Master showed up out of nowhere and informed him that she had basically been stalking him, Lee had suspected that her interest in him wasn’t so much because of _him,_ but because of what he had seen the night before: the box that appeared out of thin air and the old man who walked out of it and got gunned down instead of Lee.

 _“…and you’ve spent all the hours since then trying to find a way to make it all mean something,”_ the Master had told him when they first met.

She wasn’t wrong, but the more weird stuff Lee did for her, the more convinced he was that she knew a lot more about that man in the box than she was telling him, and that Lee probably wasn’t going to get any answers out of her.

And on top of all that, he was also starting to worry that this “favor” she was doing him wasn’t exactly a favor at all.

_She might just be screwing with you, did you ever think of that?_

_That_ was a possibility, too: that he’d succeed in luring some of the Jackson Street Boys to the warehouse and then _nothing would happen to them_ because the Master had just glued a bunch of wires and metal together and the kind of technology that could make people afraid didn’t exist because it was impossible.

And then they’d both die.

Well… Lee would die. He wasn’t sure about the Master.

_Even if this does work, I might not make it out of there alive anyway._

_But what other choice do I have?_

When he got back to the pier, he left the box in the back of the pickup truck—even with a dolly and a ramp, it had been a pain in the ass getting it up there, so if the Master wanted it so badly she could unload it herself.

She was waiting for him outside, looking so excited that she was almost vibrating. “How did it go?” she asked.

“I did what you told me,” he said. “I went to the pay phone and pretended like I was telling the cops that I could identify them and would meet them down by this pier. Then I got in the truck and left.” 

“Brilliant!” she exclaimed. “And you’re sure they’re following you?”

“Yeah, I saw a few of them head towards the alley next to the salon. They keep their cars in the lot behind it. We’ve got five, maybe ten minutes before they get here—if they think I’m meeting cops, they might come in a group.”

The Master grinned—bared her teeth, more accurately. “The more the merrier.”

He decided to take the opportunity to ask a question: “What’s so special about the box?”

“Everything,” she said, still grinning, “but first I want to show you _this.”_ She went to the door of the warehouse and pulled it open. _“Voila!”_ she proclaimed.

Lee took a hesitant step through the door and looked around. In place of the large open space that was there before, the entrance now led to a hallway that branched off in several directions. 

“What the hell is this?” he said. In spite of all the metal walls, his voice echoed like he was inside a cave.

“Dimensionally transcendental interior,” the Master said proudly. “It’s bigger on the inside. Not just that: I left a few screws loose in the architectural reconfiguration stabilizers—well, not a proper ARS, more like the discount version—and not screws so much as very sticky molecular bonds—so the dimension is rather rickety and unstable. First time I’ve done that intentionally, now that I think about it…”

Something about the walls were drawing Lee in while also screaming at him to get away as quickly as possible. He wanted to ask _“what the_ _hell_ _?”_ a few more times, but settled for “What does that mean?” instead.

“It means that the whole place is now one big shifting maze. It’ll take them ages to get out.” She beamed. “If they ever do. Not bad for a few hours’ work.”

Lee imagined the gang members running around inside, terrified and lost… and realized that he was starting to feel bad for them.

He desperately tried to remember the events from the night before instead: the black car that followed them down the streets of Chinatown, the noise of gunfire, the horrible sound of his friends’ bodies hitting the ground… 

But it was hard to keep that in his mind while looking down the hallway in front of him, wide open like a giant mouth waiting to be fed.

He shuddered and went back outside as quickly as possible.

The Master didn’t seem to notice his reluctance. “So! All we have to do now is lure them inside, activate the emotional inducer, and then go have a snack or something. The rest of it’ll take care of itself.”

“It’s not even on yet?” He had been so creeped out that he’d just assumed that it was.

“Of course not,” she said airly, still admiring her handiwork. “I was waiting for you to get back. Figured I’d let you do the honors—it’s your revenge, after all.”

The words flew out of Lee’s mouth before he could stop them: “Is it?”

She blinked in surprise and looked at him. “Is it what?”

“I didn’t want this.”

“You said that you wanted revenge.” Her voice was quiet and dangerous.

“I did,” he insisted, “but not like _this,_ not with them running around screaming until they starve to death or something. I mean, this is basically going to torture them to death, right?”

“They could have just walked away, Lee,” the Master said icily. “They didn’t have to chase you last night, or today, but they did. They’re bringing this on themselves.”

 _Just back down and let her do it,_ Lee’s rational side begged him, but that weird “standing on a cliff” feeling from before _wouldn’t stop_ and so his mouth kept saying things that might actually get him killed based on the way that the Master’s expression was now changing into something almost feral. “Yeah, they probably _are_ bringing it on themselves,” he said, “but I don’t want to _torture_ them!”

And now she was in his face, and Lee was frozen to the spot while she snarled “They _deserve_ this, Lee! Why can’t you see that? They’ve done _nothing_ but harm other people, murdered in cold blood, terrorized their neighbors. And with one press of a button you could change all that. You could get your revenge and then just walk away, feeling so much lighter than you did before.” She grabbed his hands in hers, squeezing his fingers so tightly that Lee was starting to worry about dislocating his joints. “Wouldn’t it be a relief to think about _yourself_ instead of total strangers who will never do anything in their lives but hate and kill? Why can’t you just _walk away?”_

Apparently even imminent death wasn’t enough to keep Lee from saying what he realized, to his horror, was the truth: “Because I can’t.”

He braced himself for what was probably going to be either his very quick demise, or the Master just chucking him into the warehouse and letting him scream for the rest of his miserable life.

Instead, after a moment of what looked like the Master being just as terrified as he was, her grip on his hands relaxed and she smiled in a way that was—for the first time— _not_ weird. “Of course you can’t,” she said ruefully. “You saw a stranger dying in an alley and your first instinct was to call an ambulance. You rode with him to the hospital even though it could have gotten you taken in by the police for questioning. And even last time, when you were helping the M—helping _someone,_ it was because you believed him when he said that he was in danger.” She shook her head. “You don’t walk away, Lee… you never could.”

He slowly freed his hands from hers. “Um… okay,” was all he could really manage to say in response.

It was light-years away from the reaction Lee was expecting, but it wasn’t like he was complaining. He was confused, definitely—especially the bit about “last time”—but whatever cliff she had been pushing them both towards, Lee had somehow pulled her back from it.

“Thank you,” she said.

“For what?” Lee asked cautiously.

“For reminding me. Revenge doesn’t fix things—not on its own, at least.”

Lee wasn’t sure he agreed with that, but he also didn’t know what a better option would be. He didn’t want to let the people who killed his friends get away with it, but he also didn’t want to be the person who killed them (or worse). Still, there had to be something he could do that wasn’t just “running away while taking the moral high ground.”

“Want to go to a party?” the Master asked abruptly.

“What?”

“I know a great one that’s happening tonight. We can get dressed up, eat tiny little crepe thingies, and be rude to rich people. What do you think?”

“Uh… sure, I guess.” It was like she had an _allergy_ to saying things that made sense. “Where—” He heard the rumble of car engines in the distance. “We gotta go. They’re almost here.”

“Hmm…” the Master said, closing her eyes as she listened. “Sounds like six cars, two trucks, and a van. They must really want to find you.”

“Yeah, great, I’m the most popular kid in school—can we _go_ now?” Lee grabbed her by the arm and started pulling her towards the truck.

Opening her eyes, she freed herself from his grasp, jumped up onto the bed of the truck, and pulled a key out of her pocket. “Come on, then.”

“I said _‘go,’_ not _‘hide,’”_ Lee pointed out, trying to get hold of her again so he could shove her into the passenger seat. “They take one look at that and they’re going to shoot it to pieces, and us along with it.”

“Don’t worry,” the Master said breezily as she opened the door to the blue box, “the assembled hordes of Genghis Khan couldn’t get through that door—and believe me, they’ve tried.” She reached down and hauled Lee onto the back of the truck with her. “This is our escape route.”

Before Lee could object any further, the Master pulled him inside the box after her and shut the door behind them.

Instead of a cramped space with wooden walls, Lee found himself inside a giant room with massive glowing pillars around a central console covered in bizarre control panels.

“Welcome to the TARDIS,” the Master announced with a grin. “What do you think?”

At this moment, Lee’s mouth could only conjure up six words: 

_“What the hell is this place?”_

* * *

After they finished eating, John followed the Doctor towards Golden Gate Park, and tried to make sense of all the things that the Doctor had told him over dinner.

“I don’t understand,” John had asked once the waitress had arrived with their plates (and he was finally able to remember _something_ for once: he really liked Chinese food). _“I_ was the one that he captured. You said he was trying to create a hybrid.”

“That’s the Master’s backup plan,” the Doctor said sadly. “His primary reason for capturing you, however, was to use you as bait to lure me into a trap.”

“But you got me out,” John pointed out.

“I did, probably more through luck than anything else, but now he knows without a doubt that I’m here.”

“Do you think he’ll set another trap for you?” John thought back to the hospital—well, the facility disguised as a hospital—and all of the people who were still inside.

He also thought about what he would do to the Master if he ever got the chance to confront him face to face. 

“He almost certainly will,” the Doctor sighed. “The Master’s schemes are often complicated—almost impenetrable—but in this case it’s rather straightforward.”

“He’ll kill you.”

The corner of the Doctor’s mouth twitched in faint amusement. “Perhaps not _that_ straightforward. Do you remember how I told you that he has the ability to possess other bodies?” John nodded, and the Doctor continued his explanation: “That’s what the Master is planning: to take my body, so that he will live and I will die.”

John felt his eyes widen. “He wants to steal your body? Why?”

“Desperation. He’s desperate, and in the fight for survival, there are no rules.”

“But why _you?”_ As frightening as it had been to think that the Master wanted to experiment on John himself, it wasn’t half as terrible as the idea of him hurting the Doctor.

“There’s an ability that my species has: we can cheat death a little bit by regenerating into a new body. Same person, but a different appearance. That’s mostly why he’s after me.”

_Regeneration… why does that sound so familiar?_

John wanted to scream with frustration. _Why can’t I_ _remember_ _anything?_

He did his best to return to the matter at hand. “Mostly? Is that the only reason?”

The Doctor seemed to sag a little bit. “We used to be friends. Close friends…” He laughed almost inaudibly. “One of my only friends, really. And I… _he,_ I mean, wants to kill me, but he also can’t imagine a universe without me in it. So this way, he’d get to have both: he gets my regenerations, but I’d live on in him. We’d never be apart… we’d never be alone…”

Something in his expression looked so lost… so sad… John wanted to help, he wanted to _remember_ how to help, he wanted to—

_What is it that I want?_

“Then we should leave,” he told the Doctor, surprising himself with the resolve in his voice. “Find somewhere that he can’t follow us and _go.”_

For a moment, the Doctor looked tempted, but then he shook his head sadly. “We can’t always run, John. This is a confrontation that can’t be avoided. But don’t worry,” he said, as a grin appeared on his face. “I’ve got a plan. There’s just one item that we need to get, and his whole scheme will fall apart.”

John blinked. “It’s that easy? Why did we spend all day wandering around, then?”

“Gathering clues, of course! A good meal does wonders for the synapses, and I’ve had time to noodle on the matter—” He brandished his chopsticks, which were holding some of the lo mein, and winked. “So to speak—and I finally deduced what he’s really up to. He needs a very special piece of technology, one that is extremely rare in this time period, but not well-guarded.”

“So he might have already found it?”

“Possibly,” the Doctor admitted, but it didn’t seem to dampen his spirits. “We’ve got an edge, though: I know where to find it.” He leapt to his feet and put his top hat on his head. “No time to box up the leftovers, we have to hurry!”

When they arrived at the park, the Doctor led the way towards a large building that was probably a museum of some kind. “It’s not open to the public until later,” the Doctor explained as they went around to a side door. “I’ll have to find a way inside unobserved. Stay here.”

John frowned. “Are you sure I can’t help?”

The Doctor looked annoyed. “No, you can’t,” he snapped, then sighed as his expression softened a little. “This is going to require a bit of stealth, and it’s harder to spot one person sneaking around than two.”

John still didn’t like it, especially in light of these recent revelations about how much danger they were really in, but he conceded the point. “All right. But be careful.”

“Just wait here,” the Doctor instructed him. “Keep watch. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” He tossed John his hat and then hurried inside.

As he waited, John grew increasingly furious at the Master for putting him and the Doctor into such an awful position. Why was there someone out there who wanted nothing more than to tear everything down, to cause chaos for his own amusement, to harm everyone John loved—

He froze.

_Oh._

John thought about the Doctor, about the way the man stared at him constantly and all the unspoken things behind those dark eyes, and felt the pieces begin to fall into place.

_He’s lying to me._

* * *

By the time Lee finally calmed down enough to ask a few questions (mostly along the lines of the whole “bigger-on-the-inside” thing, the “teleports” thing, and the “travels-in-time” thing), the Master had started up the ship’s engines—the _TARDIS’s_ engines—and Lee assumed that they would be on their way immediately after that.

But instead, the Master ran off to another part of the ship, leaving Lee alone in the main room nervously listening for the sound of any pissed-off Jackson Boys outside. Either this TARDIS had great soundproofing, or the Master had done something to keep them away, because Lee couldn’t hear anything on the other side of the doors.

_At least there’s one thing going my way today._

After a few minutes, the Master returned, carrying a bunch of black and white fabric in one hand and a pair of black shoes in the other.

And she had apparently taken a break in the middle of their getaway to _change clothes._

“Voila!” she proclaimed, gesturing to her new outfit: a blue button-up shirt under a pretty hideous purple plaid vest with matching pants. “What do you think?”

Lee weighed his words carefully, before deciding to just be honest: “Are you colorblind?”

She made a tiny offended sound. “I’ll have you know that I actually went to some effort this time! It’s not easy tailoring an outfit when all you’ve got is a screwdriver, especially when the last person to wear it has a very different shoulder-to-chest ratio than you do and also got into a fistfight with his former self, who did _not_ fight clean and tore off a few buttons in the process. Now put this on.” She handed Lee the items she was carrying: a tuxedo, plus shoes, socks, and a tie.

“You want me to wear _this?”_ he asked, incredulous. “I’ll look like a penguin!”

“Of course you won’t,” the Master reassured him as she rolled up her sleeves. “If I wanted you to look like a penguin I’d have brought a penguin costume. It’s a formal gala, you’ve got to look fancy.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but what you’ve got on is _not_ fancy.”

“I promised someone that I’d wear it tonight.” She scronched up her nose a little. “Do you think I should put on a tie?”

Lee shook his head. “I really don’t think that’s going to help.”

“Hmm.” She shrugged. “Well, fashion is seventy-five percent attitude. I’ll make it work. Now go get dressed, we’re on a schedule here. Down the stairs, past the bins, turn left, and you’ll find a lavatory.” Before Lee could ask what the hell a lavatory was, the Master held up a hand. “Ooo, wait. Before we head out, I’ve got one more errand to run.”

“I thought you said we were on a schedule.”

“Well, that’s the thing about schedules: you have loads more fun when you ignore them. Have you still got the keys to the truck on you?”

Lee reached into his pocket and tossed them to her. “If you step outside, you’re going to get shot,” he reminded her.

“That’s not a problem,” she replied airily. “We took the truck with us.”

“Took it where? We’re still parked outside the warehouse.”

“We’re actually back in Chinatown. Did I not mention that bit?”

Lee growled in frustration and headed downstairs to change.

* * *

John wasn’t exactly _fretting_ when the Doctor returned from inside the museum, but he was definitely _worried._

“Tada!” the Doctor proclaimed, holding up an item that was about two centimeters by three centimeters. Inside the plastic casing, John could see a small coin-sized piece of metal secured by several circuits. “Let’s go, before they notice it’s gone.”

“What is it?” John asked as they hurried through the park. 

“A beryllium chip,” he explained, tucking it into his pocket. “It’s used in things like atomic clocks, but it can also be utilised as a power source. It’s on display here to ring in the new year, which is why the Master chose this time and place to base his operations. Only now,” his smile widened, “he’s out of luck, because we’ve got it! Hah! Let’s go have a glass of bubbly and party like it’s 1999—because it is, at least for another couple of hours.”

His enthusiasm was infectious, but John couldn’t quite put away all of his worries. “What about the people he trapped in that facility?” he asked, returning the Doctor’s hat.

“That’s the beauty of it: without this chip, he’ll have to travel to a different point in time and space to find another one. He’ll just leave them behind and we can call in a police report or something before we go. The Master is long gone by now.” He beamed and put his hat back on at a slightly crooked angle. “We won!”

“And everyone lives.” Despite his relief, there was still something burning in John’s blood that wished they had been able to find the Master and given that monster exactly what he deserved.

“It’s a good feeling, isn’t it? Now come on, I’m sure you’ll remember all sorts of things once we’re back in the TARDIS—that’s our ship, in case I hadn’t mentioned that bit. Travels in space and time: anywhere or any _when_ you want to go, just name it!”

Before he could take off down the street, John screwed up his courage and held out a hand to stop him: “Wait.” He took a deep breath. “We need to talk.”

The Doctor froze. “Talk about what?” he asked warily.

It was probably best to just _say_ it: “You’ve been lying to me. About who I am. About who we are.”

The Doctor’s eyes widened, which confirmed John’s suspicions. 

“Did you think I wouldn’t figure it out?” John asked desperately. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice all the things you were saying—and _weren’t_ saying—and realise that there was something missing in your story?”

The Doctor started stammering, obviously panicking. “I—I thought it would be harmless—I was going to tell you eventually—”

John stopped his frantic attempt at an explanation by pulling the Doctor in for a kiss.

His lips were so warm; it was like there was a fire hiding inside of him.

That was what drove all of John’s other doubts out of his head: the unshakable knowledge that they had done this before so many times. 

He had the faintest ghost of a memory: the two of them running reckless down an alley, hiding from something, but still finding time for a passionate embrace.

Speaking of passion… in the present moment, John had pretty much lost track of everything but the feeling of this impossible man in his arms, the way that the Doctor’s fingers were twined into the locks of John’s hair as they kissed, and the bottomless hunger that was evident in every breath they both took, every wordless sound from their throats, and every second that felt like a lifetime had elapsed in each one.

Eventually, their lips parted—mostly due to a need for oxygen—and John was rather satisfied to see the absolutely starry-eyed look on the Doctor’s face.

John smiled shyly. “This is what we were, wasn’t it? The two of us, together?”

The Doctor laughed, his relief bordering on hysteria. “Well, I didn’t want to spring it on you while you had amnesia.”

“It feels like home,” John whispered.

“It _is_ home.”

“I still can’t remember,” he admitted. “I don’t remember how we met, or where we travelled, or what we’ve done together… I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right… I’ll remind you. Starting with this.” He kissed John again and he fell back into that wonderful haze.

He returned to his senses when the Doctor finally pulled away. “We might be only a few blocks from the Castro,” he told John, obviously amused, “but we should still find a little privacy before we go any further.”

It was only at that point that John noticed that he had apparently been in the process of undoing the buttons on the Doctor’s coat and shirt. He could feel his cheeks warming with a blush. “Oh… er, sorry about that.”

“The TARDIS isn’t far,” the Doctor reassured him, leading him by the hand.

They practically ran the whole way, and John couldn’t tell whether the breathless sensation in his chest was due to the physical exertion or due to the feeling of _home_ that resonated inside of him when he laid eyes on a strange blue police box waiting for them at the end of a side street.

“Here we are,” the Doctor announced with a smile. He pulled a key out of his pocket and unlocked the door. “Welcome home.”

Inside… it was bigger on the inside (of _course_ it’s bigger on the inside, a part of him practically sang with joy), full of wood panels and stone arches, candles and bookcases—and in spite of how spacious it was, it still felt cozy.

_I’m home._

“It’s beautiful,” John gasped.

“It is, isn’t it?” the Doctor said, smirking. He turned to look inside and froze. “Oh, _come on!”_ he groaned, actually smacking a palm against his forehead. “She _switched_ them?”

John was still taking in the sight of the TARDIS interior. “I know this place…” He was so close to remembering.

“When she turns up, I swear I’m going to pitch her off the nearest pier,” the Doctor muttered. 

But before John could ask him what he meant by that, he felt a pain in the back of his head and everything went dark.

* * *

“Here it is!” the Master announced as they approached their destination. “The Institute for Technological Advancement and Research!”

“Who the hell has a fancy party at a science museum?” Lee asked, tugging at the collar of his shirt to loosen his tie; the Master had tied it just a little too tight.

“My kind of people,” she replied cheerfully. 

“Rich white people?”

The Master wrinkled her nose. “Not that. People with an interest in scientific inquiry, a glimpse at what could be possible, the incredible strides that humans have made in their efforts to understand the universe—”

“Maybe,” Lee said, looking around, “but I’m still seeing just a crowd of rich white people.”

She sighed. “All right, you do have a point there. Now come on, let’s go crash their party.”

For a museum, it was pretty swanky: the ceiling was made of glass, the windows were glowing with string lights hanging down like a curtain, the tables that filled the room were covered in shiny gold tablecloths, and there were gold streamers and balloons hanging from pretty much every spot higher than ten feet. Waiters moved through the crowds of people with trays of champagne and tiny appetizers. 

Lee suddenly remembered that he hadn’t eaten all day.

_Okay, this might be pretty fun._

But before he could go stuff his face, they had to get through security. 

The Master marched over to where people were checking in, leaned her elbows on the countertop, and flashed the staff a dazzling grin. “Doctor Grace Holloway and Guest. Lee. He’s my plus one.” She turned to whisper to him. “You all right with being a plus one?” She frowned. “Maybe we should have changed clothes. Or changed places. Which one of us do you think looks more like a ‘Grace’?”

“You. Definitely you,” Lee hissed in reply.

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

Fortunately, the security people didn’t seem to notice. “Have a good evening, Doctor Holloway,” one of them said. They handed over a pair of nametags and some brochures, the latter of which the Master promptly tossed over her shoulder once they were out of sight of the desk.

“We’re getting a lot of stares,” Lee pointed out as he followed her through the little clusters of old rich nerds that were mingling around the tables. “Well, _you’re_ getting a lot of stares.”

“Hmm… well, that’s not good,” the Master mused. “We’re supposed to be keeping a low profile.”

“Then why are you dressed like… that?”

“Somebody taunted me and then pouted until I agreed to wear it. Anyway, we’ve got to find a way up there without being seen.” She pointed at the upper level, where large banners announcing _“The Beginning of San Francisco Mean Time”_ hung over a giant glass case. The whole area was gradually filling up with news crews and eager onlookers.

As they headed in that direction, Lee also saw the very large security guards stationed near the bottom of the stairs. “Why do we need to go there? I thought we were just here to party.”

“We’re also here to steal a clock. Did I not mention that bit?”

He resisted the urge to pull his hair out. “You know, I’m starting to figure out why someone would force you to wear purple plaid in public: you drive people _insane!”_

“Come on,” she said, swiping a tray from a passing waiter. “Have a canape and relax. This’ll be fun, I promise.”

Lee sighed and grabbed a handful of appetizers. _“Why_ do you want to steal a clock?”

“Because it’s not just any clock,” the Master explained through a mouthful of food, “it’s an atomic clock powered by a beryllium chip. And technically, the clock can stay where it is: all we need is the chip.”

“And I take it _that’s_ the clock?” He gestured at the case.

“Correct!” She tapped on the shoulder of another waiter. “Trade you,” she said, handing the slightly perplexed woman her empty tray while walking off with one that was full of what looked like tiny pies.

“How are we going to get past those guards?” Lee asked.

The Master took a bite of one of the desserts and winced. “Ugh, this one’s got pears in it.” She spat the dessert back onto the tray and passed it to Lee. “Here, you can have the rest.”

Grossed out, Lee handed the tray to the next waiter they encountered. 

“No need to worry about the guards,” the Master continued, pulling a wallet out of her back pocket, “I came prepared this time. Psychic paper.”

“You keep saying _‘this time,’”_ Lee pointed out. “What does that mean? Have you done this before?”

“A long time ago,” she admitted, “but I’ve gotten better at it.”

“You go do your psychic thing,” he sighed. “I’ll wait out here.”

“Oh _come on,”_ the Master said impatiently. “I still need your help on this.”

She dragged him over to the security guard at the bottom of the stairs. “Good evening!” she said cheerfully while showing the inside of the wallet to what looked like a sentient brick wall in a suit. “I’m here to give a backstage tour of our star attraction.”

The guard’s extremely skeptical gaze briefly flicked over to Lee. “Who’s this?”

The Master pretended to look appalled. “You really don’t recognize Professor Chang? One of the _leading lights of our generation_ in the field of particle physics?”

“He looks like he’s in high school.”

“Because he is a _prodigy!_ Went to university at the age of fourteen, got a professorship at the age of seventeen, and now he’s heading up the Department of Physics at St. Luke’s University in Bristol! How have you not heard of him?”

Lee did his best to look serious and wise. “Yeah, I mean, it’s not like you don’t work at the Institute for _Technology_ and _Research,_ right?”

The Master elbowed him in the ribs. “Technological Advancement and Research,” she whispered.

“Yeah. That.”

“So, if you don’t mind, we’ll just take that little look around and then be out of your way,” the Master said, breezing by the guard.

They had just made it to the stairs when they heard a different voice from behind them. “Grace?” Lee and the Master both turned to see a short middle-aged guy in a rust-colored jacket, a red bow tie, and glasses. His nametag identified him as Professor Wagg.

“The people at check-in told me that you had arrived, and I wanted to—” His facial expression shifted as he looked down at her nametag and then back up at her face. “You’re not Doctor Holloway.”

The Master winced. “I’ve had work done?” she suggested.

“Security!” Professor Wagg yelled.

“I knew you should have been Grace instead,” she grumbled to Lee. “Run!”

“Run where?”

“Out! Wait, no. Upstairs! That’s where the clock is!”

“You mean the one surrounded by even _more guards?”_ Lee yelled. 

“Oh! Right, we need a distraction.” She tucked the wallet back into her pocket and got out that screwdriver thing. “I love a good distraction.”

“Well, it had _better_ be a good distraction, because otherwise we’re leaving here in handcuffs!”

“It’ll be fine! Just a bit smoky.” She pointed the device up at the strings of lights hanging on the walls. They flashed, sparked, and then caught on fire.

The room quickly turned into a stampede of tuxes and fancy dresses. 

“Now wha—” Lee’s question was cut off by the Master pulling him into the space under the staircase, which kept him from being knocked over by the guards running from the restricted area towards the front of the room.

Once the coast was clear, she ran up the stairs. Lee followed close behind, hoping that they could finish this weird heist and get the hell out before they passed out from smoke inhalation. The fires were on the other side of the room from them, but Lee knew from a few unfortunate incidents that smoke tended to go up.

The Master dashed to the back of the glass case. “Right, here we are!” She crouched down and opened the panel, revealing a bunch of computer parts.

Lee looked around nervously. The fires that the Master had started were occupying most of the staff’s attention, and the chaos of everyone bolting for the doors would buy them some time, but he really _really_ didn’t want to get arrested for the crime of following a crazy lady to the wrong party.

Said crazy lady, meanwhile, was now holding a piece of paper in her hand and glaring at it like it had personally insulted her.

It turns out that it had: as Lee looked over her shoulder, he read the contents of the note:

_Hello, Master. Too bad you didn’t get here earlier: you missed a fantastic beryllium chip. Have fun escaping from whatever mess you’ve gotten yourself into. Kisses! — the Doctor_

“Who’s the Doctor?” Lee asked.

“When he turns up, I swear I’m going to pitch him off the nearest pier,” she muttered, crumpling the piece of paper in her hand.

The fire alarms finally went off and the museum’s sprinkler system activated.

“Now what do we do?” he demanded, feeling the water beginning to soak into his clothes.

“Don’t worry, I know a way out the back. You’re not afraid of heights, are you?”

Lee groaned. “Yeah, I am, actually!”

“Me too! Let’s go.” She dragged him down a hallway with an ecstatic grin on her face.

* * *

The Master woke up as usual: in an instant, switching from unconscious to conscious like a switch being thrown. His head ached. 

Actually, a _lot_ of things ached.

It didn’t take him long to realise why: he had been knocked out and then strapped into a very familiar contraption.

 _Oh, this is_ _embarrassing_ _._

He tried to recall what the hell had happened the last time: there had been a lot more hypnosis, a few more humans—at least there were no humans here this go-around, so that was one thing that he _didn’t_ have to worry about.

But otherwise? Pretty similar setup. His past self had locked him into that jury-rigged apparatus that kept him stuck in one place with his eyes held open, so that his past self could open up the heart of the TARDIS in the Cloister Room and make him stare into it until old Snake Eyes could possess him.

Which also meant…

 _Oh, please don’t make me watch_ _this_ _…_

His day just got even worse: his past regeneration strutted out wearing Time Lord ceremonial robes.

_Oh, please no._

Snake Eyes struck a pose.

_Don’t say it, don’t you dare._

“I always dress for the occasion,” he drawled.

_Is it possible to trigger a new regeneration through sheer embarrassment?_

“Can we just… can we _not_ have the theatrics this time?” the Master groaned.

 _I never thought I’d_ _ever_ _say those words._

_Must be growing up, I suppose._

“I’ve wasted all my lives because of you, Doctor,” his past self sneered, coming down the stairs and towards the center of the room where the aperture that would open the heart of the TARDIS was located, “and now, I will solve two problems at once: restore my regenerations and _finally_ be rid of you.”

“I forgot about the monologue,” the Master grumbled. This was mortifying, but not a complete disaster. He knew what Snake Eyes’ plan was, knew the factors that he would consider, and knew the contingencies he would make—which, most importantly, meant that the Doctor was still alive and probably unconscious somewhere nearby. He couldn’t figure out exactly where due to the whole bondage situation, but that wouldn’t matter shortly: handcuffs tended to be more of a _“suggestion”_ than a _“restraint”_ for him.

The main challenge would be in resolving the matter before the Doctor woke up.

_Might as well get started._

“Well, good news,” he began brightly. “There’s no Doctor here to stop you. It’s just us. Or, rather,” he added with a smirk, “it’s just _you.”_

His past self stared at him in a wary silence.

“Oh _come on,”_ the Master said, irritated. “I’m one of your future regenerations—more good news, incidentally: you _do_ get a new cycle of regenerations! Just not _today,_ since the Doctor isn’t here. I won’t go into the details of why I’m here, but I impersonated him so that I could swipe his TARDIS and mess with his latest companion. So let me out of this damned thing and we’ll figure out a plan.”

Those really unfortunate slitted pupils remained locked on his face for another long moment… and then Snake Eyes laughed. “Nice try, Doctor, but your talent for deception is dismal as always.”

“For crying out loud, I’m _you,_ you dramatic twit! We had this whole backup plan where if we ever found ourselves in a sticky death-related situation, we’d request that the Doctor take our ashes back to Gallifrey—”

 _Which is nothing_ _but_ _ash now…_

“—and then use the exposure to the artron energy to reconstitute and swipe a new body once we got there. Except that we got a little _greedy_ on the trip over and it threw the TARDIS’s navigation off and landed us here on Earth in 1999. And then the Doctor went and got himself inconveniently shot so we had to follow him to the hospital and finally resort to taking over that dull ambulance driver who is falling apart as I speak—or, rather, as _we_ speak since there’s only one of us here!”

The idiot in front of him snorted in derision. “It’s pointless to keep up this charade. You just regenerated: obviously this is your new body.”

“If I was the Doctor, how would I know _any_ of the things I just said?”

“Because you have an irritating talent for derailing my plans. You must have deduced it.”

“You’re lucky he’s not here at the moment, that compliment would probably make him even more insufferable.”

_Come on, think!_

“Okay,” the Master began, “how about this: when we were a kid, there was this one tree on our father’s estate which we got the completely mad idea was hiding some kind of treasure in the root system, so we grabbed a shovel and tried to dig the damned thing up, but since it was taking too long we decided to cobble together a matter transference device and ended up setting the entire tree and half of an acre of grass on fire.”

Now Snake Eyes was just looking at him with _pity._ “I told the Doctor about that. None of the things from my youth will work as a lie, Doctor, because when I was young and a fool, I told you _everything.”_

 _Damn it!_ He had a point, even if it had led him to the entirely wrong conclusion: there wasn’t a lot about him that the Doctor didn't already know.

Hell, they even knew each other’s _names._

The Master searched his memory for _something_ in his life that hadn’t involved the Doctor, but kept coming up empty because almost all of the truly _memorable_ stuff that this version of himself would know about had all involved the Doctor in some way.

“All right,” he said after another few minutes of thought. “Remember back when we were in that dismal Earth mining town because we’d followed the Rani there thinking that it might be fun to inconvenience a different Time Lord for a change—though, let’s be honest with ourselves for once: we were there because we were hoping that it would get the Doctor’s attention—and then of course, when he did show up, we got to deliver some truly biting insults about his vulgar excuse for fashion—although,” he couldn’t help adding, “your current get-up is far from our best moment, aesthetically.”

Snake Eyes gave him a sneer. “As you just said, Doctor: you were _there_ at the time. The events in Killingsworth aren’t worth wasting your breath on.”

“Oh, but I wasn’t _talking_ about the part that the Doctor was there for,” the Master corrected him. “I’m talking about what happened _after,_ when we went with the Rani back to her TARDIS and tried to be _helpful_ and set an escape route, do you remember what happened next?” He couldn’t help grimacing at the memory. “That swotty _bitch_ kneed us in the groin! Oh, and _then,_ because our day was going so well already, her TARDIS went berserk and started accelerating and knocked over some specimen of hers, and then the time spillage from the malfunctioning engines meant that we then had to deal with a _fully grown dinosaur_ rampaging around the place! _So!”_ He was shouting now. “It was an incident so embarrassing that we never told _anyone_ about it, so either I’m _you_ or I’m the Rani, and you’d have to be pretty thick to think that she gives a single damn about the Doctor or his little pets!”

He _had_ eventually told the Valeyard the bit about the dinosaur (rather, she dragged it out of him at some point between when they were bothering Missy and Eyebrows and when she tricked him into getting trapped in the Pandorica for two weeks), but it wasn’t as though Snake Eyes knew that. 

_Come on, I don’t deal in honesty very often… just put the pieces together, you mad bastard._

Snake Eyes was silent. He appeared to be thinking it over—probably recalling his own version of events, trying to find a way to pin it on the Doctor.

_I never thought I’d say this, but I might be a bit too obsessed with the Doctor._

There was a groan from nearby. “Oh look,” Snake Eyes said with a mock gasp. “He’s waking up.” He grinned widely. “You see, Doctor, I need a pair of _human_ eyes to open the heart of your TARDIS.”

The Master couldn’t help it: he laughed. “Good luck with that.”

The Doctor groaned again and sat up, which meant that the Master could finally see his face as he stared up at the fashion victim that loomed over him. 

“The Doctor’s latest pet,” Snake Eyes said. “I see he still picks them for their looks rather than their competence.”

 _Don’t giggle, don’t giggle, do_ _not_ _giggle…_

“The Master, I assume?” the Doctor said coldly. 

Snake Eyes turned to look at the Master. “Well done, Doctor: this one’s brighter than he looks.” He focused on the Doctor again. “I’d say ‘at your service,’ but _you’re_ the one who’ll be serving _me.”_ He gestured to the closest of the reflector staffs surrounding the aperture. “Pull the staff out and then look into the light.”

“Don’t do it,” the Master interrupted. “If he opens the heart of the TARDIS, then he’ll be able to steal my body, _and,_ on top of that, the entire planet will be toast in about ten minutes.” Of course, in his opinion, the “killing him” thing was much more important than the “frying Earth” thing.

To his satisfaction, the Doctor’s priorities seemed to be the same as his: “If you think I’m going to let you kill him,” he hissed at Snake Eyes, “let alone _help_ you, then you’re an even worse monster than I thought you were.”

Snake Eyes grinned. “Thank you,” he said, as though the Doctor had paid him a compliment. 

It was difficult to roll his eyes while his eyelids were being held open, but the Master somehow managed it. 

His former regeneration’s mirth was brief. “You may have adopted the Doctor’s self-righteousness,” he snapped, “but I think you’ll be a bit more cooperative once you understand what will happen if you refuse.”

“You’ll kill me?” the Doctor retorted in disgust. “Your threats are a little one-note, aren’t they?”

“Oh, this won’t be nearly as straightforward. You see, I just need the Doctor _alive_ in order to get his body. He doesn’t have to be… intact. I can always regenerate after I take control.” He laughed briefly. “What _has_ he told you about me?” He held up a hand to preempt the Doctor’s response. “Never mind. I assume it’s the usual complaining about my hobbies… but did he tell you about a little trick I know? Human minds are weak, you know. Easy to control.” He leaned in until his face was centimeters from the Doctor’s. “If you don’t help me open the Eye of Harmony, the Doctor will be mutilated beyond recognition… very slowly… and you’ll be the one doing it.”

The Doctor’s eyes widened in fear.

“He’s bluffing, Doc—John,” the Master countered. “You’re not human, it won’t work on you.”

 _If it_ _did_ _, my life would have been so much easier._

“Do you really want to take that chance, _John?”_ Snake Eyes whispered.

The Master was tempted to tell Snake Eyes who “John” really was, but the last thing he needed right now was to deal with the Doctor being even _more_ confused.

And besides, it wasn’t as though that paranoid bastard would even believe him.

Well, all he could do now was hope that staring into the heart of the TARDIS didn’t cause the Doctor to swap places with Snake Eyes accidentally.

Predictably, the flimsy threat worked: after giving Snake Eyes a look of absolute fury, the Doctor lifted the reflector staff from its mooring. After he dropped it to the ground, a blue light shone out of the hole like a tiny spotlight.

“Go on,” Snake Eyes said, putting a hand on the back of the Doctor’s head and shoving his face at the light. “Have a nice long look.”

For a moment, the Master wondered if anything would happen at all: the first time around, he wasn’t even able to remove the reflector staff, let alone open the heart of the TARDIS. At the time, he assumed that only humans could manage it… but considering that it was Gallifreyan technology, that didn’t make sense in retrospect. 

The _actual_ reason for his initial failure, he realised, was because the Doctor’s TARDIS had the capacity to hold a grudge.

And even if the Doctor didn’t know who he really was, the TARDIS always knew.

With a rumble of stone on stone, the aperture began to open, flooding the room with even more blue light.

_Okay… this might be a problem._

“There,” the Doctor growled, with his face still pressed against the beam of light. “You’ve got what you wanted from me.”

“Good boy,” Snake Eyes said approvingly, stroking the Doctor’s hair, which caused the Master to have the very confusing experience of being jealous of his former self.

“Oi!” an offended voice called from the entrance to the Cloister Room. “Hands off!”

The flood of relief that the Master felt upon hearing the Valeyard’s voice was almost enough to knock him unconscious again.

Snake Eyes turned in surprise. “Who are—?”

His question was interrupted by the Doctor wiggling free and trying to swing the heavy reflector staff at him. It didn’t connect: Snake Eyes was surprisingly agile for a walking corpse, and ducked out of the way.

“Lee, go help him!” the Valeyard ordered, heading towards where the Master was still chained up.

“Which one?” the young man asked.

“The fluffy one,” she clarified. 

“Took you long enough,” the Master grumbled as she undid his restraints.

“There’s that spirit of gratitude I’ve come to expect from you,” she snarked. “Especially since I could just leave you like this.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to give you the impression that you had the upper hand.” He stretched the stiffness out of his arms and shoulders, and gave her a kiss. “Hello, love.”

“I see you couldn’t resist the urge to overcomplicate your own plan to the point of self-sabotage.”

“Lucky for me that you couldn’t resist the urge to charge in and save the day.”

“Very lucky,” she agreed. “You should start brainstorming now about how you’re going to make it up to me later.”

“It’s like you _want_ me to be too distracted to function during this,” he complained.

The Valeyard gestured at the empty restraints. “If this is where your version of ‘functioning’ leads, I think I’ll take my chances with you being distracted.”

“That’s _your_ bondage gear, not mine.”

She smirked. “Have you got the chip on you?”

Thankfully, Snake Eyes hadn’t removed it from his pocket; the Valeyard grabbed the chip and took off in the direction of the control room.

“Shouldn’t you be helping that boy out?” the Master asked as he followed her.

“Lee has it under control.”

“Lee barely has his _hair_ under control,” he countered. “He’s going to end up with a broken neck again.”

“It’s two on one, he’ll be fine. How’s the Doctor doing?”

The Master couldn’t help frowning as he reviewed the events of the last few minutes. “Was he always this angry?”

“What do you mean?”

“He gave Snake Eyes a look that I don’t remember seeing back then.” When he killed Lee and the surgeon girl, the Doctor had been upset, naturally… but there was something more in it this time.

It was as if the Doctor _hated_ him.

The Master was pretty sure that no one disliked his former regenerations more than he himself did, but this version of the Doctor may have been a very close second place.

It wasn’t a comfortable realisation.

“Right,” the Valeyard said, crouching under the TARDIS console and removing a panel to reveal the wires that powered the time rotor. “Just need to jump start things a bit.”

“The Eye has only been open for a couple of minutes,” the Master pointed out. “It can’t have drained the power from the engines already.”

“You’re right about that—”

He laughed. “You never admit that I’m right.”

“Shush.” She started pulling out wires and making more of a tangled mess than an actual solution. “The TARDIS is probably still functional enough to close it without needing the chip, but it took me ages of work and a trip back to Gallifrey before I could fix it thoroughly enough to _keep_ it closed.”

“This is what happens when you don’t do any routine maintenance and hold everything together with paste and string,” he complained, shoving in beside her and trying to get a look at what she was working on.

“Pass me the sonic screwdriver you’re carrying,” she instructed him.

“I thought you had _his_ screwdriver,” the Master said as he handed it over.

“I did, but I sort of gave Lee the contents of my pockets on our way here.” She began connecting some of the wires to the beryllium chip.

_“Why?”_

She shrugged. “I figured he would find them more useful than I would.”

“Did you explain what the TCE does?”

“No.” The Valeyard’s eyes widened in realisation. “Oh. Well, that could get messy.”

He pretended to be offended. “Excuse me, but if you recall, I built that for the express purpose of _not_ being messy.”

“Only you could take what is essentially a method of storage organisation and turn it into a murder weapon.”

“And only _you_ could take a screwdriver and make it _impossible_ to use as a weapon,” he countered.

“I did set a fire at a fancy party with it,” she said, smiling proudly.

“Tonight?”

“You would have been very pleased.”

“Was there screaming?”

 _“So_ much screaming.” The Valeyard replaced the panel and got up to look at the controls. “See? I wreaked some havoc after all.” 

He took the opportunity to stand behind her and nuzzle the nape of her neck. “You’re going to tell me _every single detail_ when we’re back on our TARDIS.”

“It worked,” she said, still focusing on the console. “Just have to do _this—”_ She flipped a pair of switches and all the lights in the ship flickered briefly. “—and we have _one_ deactivated TARDIS and _one_ saved Earth.”

The Master wrapped his arms around her waist. “These clothes look very sexy on you, by the way,” he whispered.

She laughed, but he could still hear the way her breathing had sped up. “Lee wouldn’t stop insulting them, you know.”

“I knew there was a reason I killed him last time,” he grumbled.

“Hey, you’d better get back in here!” Lee yelled from the Cloister Room.

The Master sulked as the Valeyard squirmed her way out of his arms. “And now there’s _another_ reason.”

When they arrived in the Cloister Room, it was empty except for Lee, who was covered in… something.

“What happened?” the Valeyard asked, looking him over.

“There was _slime,”_ the young man said, trying to wipe as much of it off of his tuxedo as he could. “I thought he was just an ambulance driver!”

The Master winced. That regeneration was really one of his more disgusting ones.

“He spat a bunch of this stuff at me and by the time I was able to see again, he and the other guy were gone.”

The Valeyard glanced briefly at the center of the room where, fortunately, the aperture was closed. “Well, either they fell in there…” she trailed off.

The Master shook his head. “More likely they left by another route.” He indicated the stairs that Snake Eyes had entered through when he first woke up.

He wondered how much the Doctor could remember now.

“There’s another way into the control room from there.” The Valeyard turned to Lee. “Head back the way we came. We’ll follow them through the back way. Whatever you do: _do not_ let them leave the TARDIS. Got it?”

“As long as he doesn’t hock another loogie at me,” Lee grumbled as he left.

“Come on,” the Valeyard told the Master once they were alone again. “Let’s go.”

“Follow the monologuing, I guess,” he said, running after her. At the top of the staircase, his foot briefly slipped in something. “Ugh, or the… _emissions.”_

“I almost prefer the actual rotting skeleton version of you,” the Valeyard admitted. 

“Can we _not_ cross paths with _him,_ by the way?”

“I think we can manage that. You’ll owe me, though.”

“I’ll add it to the list,” the Master noted. TARDIS interiors were always a bit chaotic—the Doctor’s TARDIS more than most—and at the moment this one was like a particularly deranged monastery. 

“Hmm,” the Valeyard murmured, examining the trails of slime that Snake Eyes had left in his wake. “Looks like my hunch was correct: they’re heading to the control room.”

“Well, they are _us,_ after all. Stands to reason we’d be able to predict their moves.”

By the time they made it to the control room, the Master was out of breath. “Why did you put so many damn stairs in this place?” he complained.

“I was on a health kick!” the Valeyard protested. “I needed the exercise!”

Lee was guarding the exit by wielding what was either a wrench or a neutron ram. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Snake Eyes seemed to be trying to strangle one another.

“I call dibs on the cute one,” the Master said, hurrying to pull the Doctor out of range.

To his surprise, the Doctor actually struggled to get out of his grip. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” the Master tried soothing him, “we’ll handle him, don’t worry.” 

The Valeyard, with an expression that implied she was holding back a gag, managed to get behind Snake Eyes and wrap the back of that ridiculous robe around his neck.

With a strangled sound, Snake Eyes hit the ground.

“Here,” the Master said, getting up passing the Valeyard a handful of spare wire from beside the console.

While she busied herself with tying Snake Eyes up, the Master helped the Doctor sit down on the floor by the console, narrowly avoiding the slime-covered tuxedo jacket that Lee had dropped there. He looked practically catatonic, but was absently going through the pockets—probably searching for his sonic screwdriver. 

_The damned thing is practically the Doctor’s security blanket._

When it was clear that Snake Eyes was fully restrained, Lee rejoined them at the console. “This is the same kind of ship as yours, right?” he asked the Valeyard, who nodded. “So why does _this_ one look like a sci-fi church?”

“Like a _what?”_ the Valeyard said, a little offended.

“He’s got a point,” the Master chimed in. “And what was with the leaves and the bats in the Cloister Room?”

“Halloween party! Bram Stoker was going to come and I wanted to go all out with the decorations. Of course, he ended up arriving late because there was a thing with a—”

“Not the time to name-drop, love.”

She looked annoyed. _“You’re_ the one who asked!”

The Master made a snort of derision. “You don’t do this about _me,_ do you? Go off on tangents about the time I was minding my own business in a UNIT prison and trying to help those poor Sea Silurians revive their colonies—”

“So that they could help you take over the Earth!”

He did what he thought was a fairly good impression of her: _“‘Oh, cute little human pet, your ignorant question reminds me of the time that I blundered into yet another mess and not only got myself captured but also got my poor darling Master captured with me as well due to a misunderstanding that was entirely my fault, and we both nearly drowned_ _several_ _times which I frankly would have deserved but which the Master did not due to him looking so very handsome that day because he discovered that I was coming to visit and took the time to put some actual_ _effort_ _into his appearance, unlike me, who just flings myself at the nearest piece of fabric and hopes for the best.’”_

“Feel better now?” the Valeyard asked drily, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Not yet. _‘In addition to my terrible judgment, I was also a very rude guest who stole someone’s lunch—’”_

“I still don’t understand why you’re upset over that.”

“Because it was rude!”

She scoffed. _“That’s_ what you consider rude? You had just tried to _shoot_ me!”

“It really _is_ you,” Snake Eyes interrupted, looking at the Master with something resembling horror on his face. 

“Well, it’s _about time,”_ he retorted. “Shame you couldn’t figure that out before you nearly ripped apart the fabric of reality.”

“Who is she?”

“What, you don’t recognize your best enemy?” the Valeyard said, a trifle indignantly.

“He’s a bit thick,” the Master whispered to her.

“Shut up,” snapped his past self, who turned his head to regard the Valeyard again. “So, the Doctor regenerated from that bothersome little man into a woman?”

“Got the upgrade,” the Valeyard confirmed cheerfully. “Though I actually regenerate into him first.” She pointed at the Doctor, who was finally starting to pay attention to what was going on around him.

_Oh dear._

“Him?” Snake Eyes asked incredulously.

The Doctor looked just as confused. “I’m not the Doctor,” he protested. He gestured towards the Master. “He’s the Doctor.”

“What are you talking about?” the Valeyard asked. _“You’re_ the Doctor, and _he’s_ the Master.”

The Doctor then pointed at Snake Eyes. “I thought _he_ was the Master.”

Lee piped up as well: “Wait, I thought _you_ were the Master,” he said to the Valeyard.

“Oh, that was just a cover story,” the Valeyard replied. She pointed at each member of the group one by one. “He’s the Master, but he was pretending to be the Doctor; that other one is _also_ the Master, just a past version of him who happens to be wearing someone named Bruce as a skinsuit; and _he’s_ the Doctor.” She turned back to face the teenager. “And _you’re_ Lee, in case you had gotten confused.”

“Lady, I am _way_ past confused.”

“I’m _not_ the Doctor!” the Doctor cut in. “My name is John Smith. I’m the Doctor’s companion, that’s all.”

The Valeyard turned to the Master as her jaw dropped. “You _didn’t,”_ she hissed, pulling him aside.

He couldn’t help grinning. “All I agreed to do was pretend to be the Doctor. I never said anything about reminding him that _he_ was the Doctor as well.”

She groaned. “We all almost died because you couldn’t keep it in your trousers for _one day?”_

“You said distract him—that would have counted as distracting!” He winked. “And you know my distractions are always pleasant.”

The Valeyard was struggling to keep a straight face. “Don’t you dare try flirting with me right now.”

“I don’t need to _try,_ love.”

Meanwhile, the Doctor was staggering to his feet. “I’m not the Doctor…” he whispered. “I’m not… you said that I… that I was…” He gave the Master a look of anguish. “You weren’t lying to me… you weren’t, were you?”

Hating himself just a little bit, and unable to look the Doctor in the eye, the Master reluctantly nodded. “I lied,” he said. “You’re the Doctor, not me.”

“But today… we spent the day together, I was so _happy_ being with you—”

Snake Eyes erupted in peals of laughter. “Oh my… oh, Doctor, falling for a ruse like that… this is a new low, even for you.”

The Doctor’s entire body tensed in rage as he whirled around to face him. _“You,”_ he spat at Snake Eyes. “I may not remember much, but I remember _everything_ you’ve done. All of the pain and death that you’ve caused, enough to make the _Daleks_ want to put you on trial before killing you, and here you are, yet again, cheating death by taking yet another life, but you still have _nothing to show for it!”_ He took a few steps closer to where Snake Eyes was still tied up on the floor. “And meanwhile, all I’ve done is hand you second chance after second chance, over and over, for _centuries,_ and it never changes.”

The Master couldn’t quite interpret the Valeyard’s expression as she listened to her past self, but since she seemed content to watch the drama play out without interfering, he decided to stay out of the way as well.

“And here comes the _speech,”_ Snake Eyes drawled. “Five minutes ago, you didn’t even know your own name!”

“You’re right,” the Doctor said with a bleak laugh. “I don’t know who I am… the regeneration, the hazy memories… I’m still working it out. I can’t keep things straight in my head… but I do know this.” He held up the screwdriver.

The Master braced himself for another self-righteous lecture about what it _really_ meant to be the Doctor, the false modesty, and the stupid sanctimonious _“mercy”_ he thought he was showing… but then he got a closer look at the device in his hand.

It wasn’t the sonic screwdriver.

The Doctor’s expression hardened but his voice was shaking. “I know, more than anything else right now, that this is what you deserve.”

He fired the tissue compression eliminator.

The sound of the tiny figure that was all that remained of Snake Eyes hitting the floor could be heard quite clearly in the stunned silence of the control room.

Lee was the first to speak. “Holy _shit.”_

The Doctor threw the TCE down with such force that the Master could hear it break.

“Well, that stung on _several_ levels,” the Master couldn’t help muttering. “It’s going to take me ages to repair that.”

The Doctor looked up at him, a faint glimmer of hope in his eyes. “But if you’re still here, then…”

He shook his head. “She wasn’t lying about that: I’m the Master. It’s a bit complicated.”

“Why did you lie?” the Doctor demanded. “Why did you make me think that you were… that _I_ was…”

“It was a joke.”

“It was a mistake,” the Valeyard corrected him with a sigh. “If I had known he was going to take it this far, I’d have stopped him.”

“Was it a joke as well when you pretended to be the Master?” the Doctor said accusingly.

“More like a Christmas panto, really,” the Master muttered.

The Doctor kept his eyes fixed on the Valeyard. “Tell me why.”

“It was immature,” she admitted. “We got complacent and I let him indulge in another one of his usual disguise-based schemes. It was supposed to be harmless fun. All we needed to do today was kill time until after midnight, when the Master’s window of opportunity closed—that version of the Master, I mean.” She pointed at the shrunken remains on the floor. 

Despite that technically being his own corpse (well, _technically_ it was the corpse of a human ambulance driver), the Master couldn’t bring himself to feel bad about it. 

“I’ll agree with you on one point,” he conceded to the Doctor. “I probably did deserve that.”

“What happened to _you?”_ the Doctor demanded of his future self.

The Valeyard looked away. “Things changed.”

“How could they have changed so much that you’re letting him run amok like that? What are you doing?”

“It’s a lot to explain,” she said, “and all it will bring you is heartbreak. Trust me: you don’t want to know what happened.”

“If you’re my future, then I think I have a right to know!” he snapped. “I barely know who I am right now… this entire day was a lie!”

The Valeyard looked pained. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I’m so sorry.”

“About wh—?” The Doctor’s question was abruptly cut off by Lee coming up behind him and hitting him on the back of the head with a wrench.

The Doctor slumped to the ground, unconscious.

“Well done, Lee,” the Valeyard said, looking a little relieved to have that awkward conversation over with. “Excellent initiative.”

Lee shrugged. “Least I could do after he started shooting that thing off.” He tossed the wrench to the floor. “So who are you, really?”

The Valeyard shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. This is where we part ways. Are you going to be alright?”

“I guess. Is this the sort of stuff that you usually do?”

“More or less.” She was starting to get that look in her eye that the Master recognized as the one that typically preceded adopting a pet. He grabbed her by the sleeve and pulled her aside.

“We are _not_ taking him with us!” he hissed.

“I know, I know,” she said unconvincingly. “It’s just that he’s had a bit of a rough day and I don’t want to abandon him—”

“He’ll be fine. Besides, it’s not like you checked up on him the last time we did all this.”

She looked a little guilty. The Master sighed—and then got an idea: “You know, there’s still something from my bag of tricks that you haven’t tried yet.”

The Valeyard looked aghast. “I told you that I’m not going to—”

 _“Non-_ lethal,” he assured her. “Come on, remember when I did this all the time?” He waggled his fingers in front of her face.

She obviously knew what he was indicating, because she rolled her eyes. “I did that earlier, but just to get the bag. I’m not doing it again.”

“I’m not saying that you hypnotize him into jumping off a building. Think of it as a really good pep talk. Have fun with it.”

_Come on, don’t take the high road just this once…_

Her eyes flicked over to Lee for a moment and then back to him.

_It’s not like this will matter in the end anyway._

She apparently got an idea. “Lee, could I talk to you for a second?”

The Valeyard gazed into the young man’s eyes and waved her hand around in what she probably thought was a mystical kind of gesture but mostly looked like she was trying to swat a fly. “Let’s see… er, _‘I am the Master and you will obey me, and uh, stay in school. And off the drugs. And don’t run with scissors. Really, just skip scissors altogether, it’s probably safer that way. And be nice to your neighbours.’”_

The Master put his head in his hands and tried not to audibly groan.

“Uh… okay?” Lee replied, blinking a few times in confusion.

“Did that work?” she asked.

“Pretty sure it didn’t,” Lee said.

“Almost certainly not,” the Master agreed.

“Probably for the best, really,” the Valeyard said with a shrug. “And, since I’m feeling rather Father Christmas at the moment, here you go.” She brandished a plastic card. 

“What’s that?” Lee asked as he examined it.

“Bank card. One million dollars in the account. Don’t spend it all in one place.”

“What am I going to do with a million bucks?”

“Good point,” she said, tapping her chin thoughtfully with a finger. “Money can’t buy happiness, after all—”

She reached for the card, but Lee slipped it into his pocket before she could get within range. “Yeah, but I bet it _helps,”_ he said with a grin.

“Still a cheeky one, aren’t you? But I did mean it—you’ll be happier doing something good with it.” She looked thoughtful again. “Although, of the two of us, I think you might be better at helping people than I am.”

“Looks like we’re even now.”

She smiled. “I think we are, at that. Goodbye, Lee. I hope 2000 winds up being a much better year for you.”

He patted his pocket. “It’s off to a pretty good start.”

“I’m sorry about your friends.”

His enthusiasm flagged. “Yeah… me too. I don’t know what to do about that… but I’ll do _something.”_ He headed for the door. “And if you ever need anything,” he added before he stepped outside, _“please_ don’t call me.”

The Valeyard laughed. “We’ll see about that.”

After a moment of quiet, the Master looked down at the Doctor’s unconscious body. “So,” he sighed, “what do we do with _him?”_

“I have an idea,” the Valeyard said, “but I’ll need your help carrying him.”

* * *

“No,” Grace Holloway said wearily, “that was _not_ me at the ITAR gala. I stayed home instead.” She rolled her eyes at the response on the other end of the line and snapped “Yes, I’m positive I wasn’t there!”

She slammed down her phone with a grimace. “The perfect ending to a perfectly _awful_ day,” she muttered. “Midnight calls about identity theft.”

Grace really didn’t know why anyone would want to be _her_ right about now. Frankly, if she had the choice, she wouldn’t mind being someone else for a little while.

There was a knock at the door.

_What now?_

Even before she got to the door, she could see him through the glass: a man about her own age, with a leather satchel slung over his shoulder. 

When she opened the door and got a good look at him, she actually had to remind herself to breathe.

_Wow._

Those blue eyes of his were enough to make her feel a little dizzy.

“Are you Grace Holloway?” he asked with a hesitant expression on his face. 

_Oh god, even his voice is attractive._

_That_ _accent_ _._

“Yes,” she said faintly, though at this point she probably would have responded to any name that voice called her.

“My name is John McCrimmon. May I come in?”

“Sure.” She showed him inside. “Sorry about the lack of furniture. Someone… moved out the other day. Today, I mean. He moved out today.”

It hadn’t even been a whole _day_ yet. 

“That's all right,” John said after giving her a brief look of concern. “I’m here about something a tad awkward. It’s related to someone that you operated on recently.”

Grace shifted uncomfortably. “I can’t really talk about my patients.”

“There was a man, an older gentleman, who came in with gunshot wounds. He didn’t have any identification on him…” John bit his lower lip nervously. “And he died on the operating table.”

Grace covered her mouth with her hand. The John Doe, the one whose body vanished. “Are you…?”

“His name is—was… James McCrimmon. He was my father. Don’t worry,” he reassured her hastily, “I’m not here to blame you—he hadn’t been in good health for quite some time before that. Heart trouble runs in the family, you see. That was what brought me to San Francisco, in fact: I’d gotten a job here so that I could take care of him.”

“How did you find out what happened to him?”

“The boy who took him to the hospital—”

“That kid stole your father’s things!”

John shook his head. “He got a bit overexcited, that’s all. He came by my father’s flat to return them and recognized the photo I showed him.” He opened his wallet and showed her a photo of himself and the man she had operated on: John was wearing academic robes and holding a diploma and both men were grinning. Even though they didn’t resemble one another all that much, there was something almost identical in their eyes and smiles.

“I’m so sorry,” she said softly.

He put a hand on her arm. “I know you did all you could.”

“I don’t even know what happened to his body—”

“Grace,” he said, his gaze so intense that her apologies dried up in her mouth, “it wasn’t your fault. That’s why I came here.”

“It was an error. It was _my_ error, and your father paid the price,” she snapped. “So why would you care about _my_ feelings?”

He didn’t seem bothered by her tone. “Because my father was a doctor, too. I know what it’s like to dream that you could hold back death.”

She could feel her heart rate speed up _(70… 75… 80…)_ and tried to tell herself that all doctors thought that way, that they all used that phrase, that it was a _common_ phrase… but the way that he seemed to be looking _into_ her _(85… 90…)_ made her feel less sure… 

_As a child, I dreamed I could hold back death._

His hand was still on her arm and Grace realized that it would only take a single step for her to get close enough to—

_(95…)_

She stepped backwards instead. “Thank you,” she said, trying to bring herself back under control in what she knew was a pretty _weird_ set of circumstances. “I mean it: thank you. You didn’t have to come all this way, and you definitely didn’t have to be kind to me.”

John let go of her arm when she moved away, but his hand was still motionless in the space between them. “My father used to say: ‘Always try to be nice, but never fail to be kind.’ I do my best to live up to that advice.”

“It’s good advice,” she agreed softly. “He sounds like a wonderful person. I wish I’d gotten to meet him. _Actually_ meet him, I mean.”

“I wish you had too.” For a moment, Grace thought that he was going to reach for her arm again, but he appeared to reconsider.

She hadn’t expected to feel as disappointed over that as she did.

John sighed quietly. “I suppose I should head back to his flat. Would you mind if I used your phone to call a cab?”

Grace felt her breath catch in her throat.

_What if—_

This was a incredibly stupid idea that was probably going to end up with her just embarrassing herself, but in the last twenty-four hours Grace had lost a patient, her job, and her fiancé, and the idea of being by herself or standing in her empty living room or doing _anything_ sensible sounded so awful that the question seemed to fly out of her mouth: “Do you want to stay here?”

She braced herself for the inevitable refusal… but instead, John looked at her shyly as a faint blush appeared on his cheeks. “I’d love to.”

Grace felt herself blushing as well. She was certain there were things she could say that would be sexy or at least not ridiculously awkward, but all that she managed to say was “I swear I’ve still got a bed.”

His laugh was just as lovely as the rest of him.

* * *

It had been nearly half an hour since the Doctor knocked on Grace’s front door, at which point the Valeyard seemed satisfied enough to head back to the TARDIS.

“I still don’t understand,” the Master confessed. He _hated_ admitting that, but was too curious to mind at the moment. “Using the Chameleon Arch, transforming him into a human, going to all of that trouble for a cover story… why? There were easier ways to strand him here.”

“The War was going to break him,” the Valeyard explained sadly, taking one last look at the house. “I thought he deserved a happier ending than that.” She smiled, looking a little wistful. “He was the one who wanted to be human most of all. Now he can be.”

“This might be the only time you’ve ever given a thought for your own well-being, you know.”

“Never too late to do something new, don’t you think? I think we both did, actually.”

“Well, I didn’t kill anyone on this trip. I’d appreciate a medal for that.”

She shook her head. “That isn’t the bit that’s new. You were kind, for once.”

“I told you before: I’m very good at being nice.”

“‘Nice’ is different than ‘kind,’” she pointed out. “You were kind to him—despite nearly ruining the whole thing by being a horny bastard—but you were kind when you didn’t have to be.”

He shifted uncomfortably. “Don’t get used to it.”

“What, worried it’ll ruin your reputation?”

“He’s one of your past selves, and you’re the exception to my policy of wanton cruelty.”

“That is _patently_ untrue,” the Valeyard argued. “You’ve been cruel to me for the vast majority of our lives.”

“Cruel, yes, but not wantonly. Speaking of wanton,” he said with a leer, “I have some ideas for when we get back to the TARDIS.”

“It’ll have to wait a few more minutes: we need to chuck the other one into the Bay before we leave.” She interrupted him before he could even speak: “And no, you don’t get to drive the truck.”

The Master tried not to visibly sulk. “Speaking of that particular TARDIS,” he said, “I meant to ask: why did you have a s—”

“A spreader bar?” she said teasingly.

“No, _that_ I could guess at. Why did you have a set of those hideous Council robes?”

The Valeyard shrugged. “Do you know how many times I had to flee Gallifrey after being elected President? I built up a collection.”

“Can we chuck them into the Bay too?” Even the memory of those robes, with their familiar patterns and designs, was enough to stoke the furnace of betrayal in his hearts.

She noticed. “Weren’t you the one who couldn’t wait to tell me all of your wanton ideas?” she reminded him.

The Master couldn’t help laughing. “Count yourself lucky that I’m not just tackling you into those bushes for a quickie.”

“You’re rather worked up considering we were only apart for a single day.”

He groaned. “Your past self was a menace. I nearly went mad with distraction.”

Her reply was in the form of a very smug grin.

They had to cut back through Golden Gate Park in order to get back to where the Valeyard had left the truck, and he felt very strange taking the same route that he had taken with one of her past regenerations only a few hours before.

“I can’t believe that he _killed_ him,” the Master said abruptly. “That wasn’t a line I expected him to cross.”

The Valeyard stopped walking and took a deep breath before replying. “I was much closer to the edge back then than you thought. That much confusion… that much pain… and then when the War started…” She looked out over the water of the nearby pond. “There was more ruthlessness in me than even _I_ realised at the time.”

“So if things had gone differently—”

“If I hadn’t met Grace. She helped me remember.”

“—you might have killed me?”

“I might have,” she admitted after a moment. “But I didn’t.”

It was a possibility the Master hadn’t considered before: that the person who would be in the _most_ danger from the Doctor or the Valeyard abandoning their precious _principles_ … was himself.

He thought back to the original sequence of events. “You even tried to save me. I remember that.”

“And you still preferred to die rather than take my hand.”

He interlaced his fingers with hers. “I’m taking it now.”

“Took you long enough,” she said with a satisfied smile.

* * *

It was as though time flew by: he stayed one night, and then another, and before Grace really had a chance to worry if they were taking things too fast, they were going furniture shopping together and John officially moved out of his late father’s apartment and into her house.

Grace’s period of unemployment was fairly brief, once the hospital’s review board met to determine what exactly had happened and found evidence of Swift’s cover-up. Although her reputation wasn’t _entirely_ untarnished in the aftermath—she _had_ lost a patient on the operating table, after all—she was still a highly skilled cardiovascular surgeon and found herself swamped with job offers. As a nice bonus, UCSF Medical Center was close enough to the private school where John taught that they could meet up for dinner if the timing worked out.

And, strangely enough, the timing almost always worked out.

Later on, while looking for something in their bedroom closet, Grace found an unfamiliar item at the bottom of his bag. “What’s the watch?” she asked.

“What watch?” John replied from the other room.

“There’s a pocketwatch in your bag.” She fiddled with the clasp. “It doesn’t seem like it opens.”

“Oh, I think it was part of that Victorian dandy costume I had,” he said, standing in the doorway. “You can toss it in the bin if you like.”

Grace couldn’t help laughing. “The _bin.”_

“Yes, yes, I’m British, very funny.”

“It’s like you speak a foreign language or something.”

 _“You’re_ the one who doesn’t speak proper English,” he teased. “I’m an English teacher, remember?”

“I’ll leave it with the coat. Maybe you’ll use it again.”

“Maybe,” he conceded. For a moment, his expression was distant, like he was trying to remember a song he’d heard as a kid.

“Are you okay?” Grace asked. She waved her hand next to his face. “Hello? Earth to John McCrimmon?”

He blinked and then took her hand in his. “Care to go for a walk? It looks like it’ll be a nice night.”

She laced their fingers together. “Oh, I think it’ll be a _very_ nice night,” she said with a wicked grin. “Let’s go.”

He replied with a grin of his own. _“Allons-y.”_

“See, _now_ you’re speaking a foreign language.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're back! Much like the real _Doctor Who,_ I had to go on hiatus for a little while, but hopefully the extra-long (movie-length?) chapter makes up for it. There's an interlude chapter that I'll post soon.
> 
> But, much like the real _Doctor Who,_ there's another hiatus coming up because we're now heading fully into the Classic Era, which means that I need to do a lot of rewatching of certain episodes. 
> 
> In the meantime, you can find me on Tumblr (@HiNerdsItsCat), where I scream about Doctor Who and Star Wars in equal measure and take questions and writing prompts. There's also another Doctor Who series that I've been writing since the start of quarantine, [Two Can Play At That Game](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1733089), in which the Thirteenth Doctor and the Dhawan!Master use the Chameleon Arch for extremely petty reasons and end up as the Twelfth Doctor's unwitting companions. 
> 
> Thanks for reading, everyone! :)


	8. Interlude: Fling a Light Into the Future

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Girl, I know the woods look dark and the trees they seem so deadly_   
>  _The girls around you are so frightened_   
>  _You start to panic and your courage starts to vanish_   
>  _And the world, it really is on fire_   
>  _And it burns and it burns and it burns_
> 
> **Setting:** Shortly before the scene with Ada in the Prologue (aka Chapter 1).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From the Prologue:
> 
>  **The Valeyard, to Ada:** “Do you know what one of the worst sentences in the universe is? _‘Oh, if only she’d lived.’_ I hate that sentence. I _hate_ things being snatched away and I _hate_ being told that it’s _supposed_ to happen. Nothing is _supposed_ to happen: things just _happen._ History isn’t sacred. Nothing is written in stone. Your history isn’t written in stone either. The same is true for Noor—she didn’t _have_ to be captured and killed by the Nazis, so I went and rescued her! Things _can_ be changed! Things _can_ be made better!”

_I’m home._

_I’m safe._

_I remember._

Noor had heard voices outside the door of her apartment in Paris. She always told herself that, if the day ever came when she was discovered, she would be brave.

But it had been just like in training, when they were given a simulated Gestapo interrogation—she was afraid.

Perhaps bravery is not the absence of fear, she wondered, but persistence in spite of that fear.

And she could persist.

But then the noise of the German agents was drowned out by a metal-on-metal screech, and a blue box—a police box, in fact, just like the ones she had seen in London—appeared inside her apartment as if by magic.

A police box was _in her apartment._

Then the confusion passed, because the door to the box opened and a woman came towards her and placed her hand on the side of Noor’s head and she _remembered._

“Doctor?”

“No time,” the Doctor said urgently. “Your cover was blown and they’re coming for you.” She grabbed Noor by the hand and pulled her inside the blue box.

And then, before Noor could even really begin to ask questions, she was standing in front of her mother’s house in London, and the box had vanished.

There were questions in the aftermath—how Noor had escaped, how she had made it back to England, what had _happened—_ but her sudden return to SOE headquarters meant that, when transmissions began arriving that were supposedly from her, Baker Street knew that they were coming from the Germans instead. The lives that were saved by that discovery were worth more than enough to overlook the gaps in her account, and those gaps were ignored entirely after the war ended when it was discovered that it was another SOE agent who had betrayed her to the Nazis.

They gave Noor a medal and sent her home to her mother.

_I’m home. I’m safe. I remember._

_But I don’t understand._

The Doctor hadn’t answered a single one of her questions: she merely pulled her out of one location and dropped her off in another, with a brief apology for erasing her memory of the last time they met.

Noor had so many questions now, and no one who could answer them.

No one alive, it turned out.

A scrawny messenger boy arrived on her doorstep one winter’s morning with an envelope that looked at least twenty years old, if not more.

_Miss Noor Inayat Khan_

_℅ Mrs. Amina Begum Inayat Khan_

_To Be Delivered on 1 January, the Year Following the Liberation of Paris_

Noor waited until she was alone in her room before opening the envelope. 

It contained a letter and an old key.

Opening the letter with shaky hands, Noor reunited with an old friend:

_23 November 1913_

_My Dear Noor,_

_I suppose it would be best if I got the most obvious questions out of the way first. Yes, I am the same Ada who appeared outside your Paris apartment with the Doctor; and, like you, she later returned to restore my memories and to change my fate._

_You see, if you are reading this, then we have both survived longer than either of us were meant to have lived._

_I wonder if you can feel it as well: the sensation of two sets of events existing side by side. I have spent the additional years I was granted studying everything I could about the nature of time. It was knowledge that was hard-won and, unfortunately, must remain closely-guarded._

_What I have learned is troubling: time is unravelling._

_Once, it was possible for beings with the necessary technical resources—people like the Doctor, for instance—to travel through time the way that you or I would travel to the seaside. But you know this, of course: we travelled with her in that manner ourselves._

_Such a feat is no longer possible. I could devise the most wondrous devices (and have, in fact), but they would not work for the same reason that a train cannot travel through a brick wall: the road may still exist, but the way has been blocked._

_We are being fenced into our own little times._

_Most people will not notice, but I suspect that you shall. There is a peculiar type of energy that you and I were exposed to during our brief journeys with the Doctor. I have studied what I could of it, but without another sample I am limited in what I can do. However, if you are willing, there are ways that you could help, even though you are reading this long after I am gone._

_There is a device that I have laboured over for much of my life, one that you may be able to bring into operation. It, and all of my notes, can be found hidden away in a small office in Shoreditch—more like a workshop than an office, really. I have enclosed the key and will put the address at the end of this missive. My life’s work, both public and secret, is now entrusted to you._

_But now, I must tell you of something possibly even more troubling than the unravelling of time:_

_The Doctor is not who she seems._

_She told me that she returned to Paris to rescue you, so perhaps you noticed it then: the change in her manner, the anger under her skin, the odd look in her eyes… did she frighten you as much as she frightened me?_

_The changes within her are far worse than a mere fit of temper. Do you recall the man who pursued us through Paris? The one who the Doctor tricked into incriminating himself with those creatures of light? The man who called himself “the Master”?_

_She is with him now. Not as a foe, but as a friend—possibly even as a lover._

_Even now, decades later, I shudder at the memory of that discovery._

_I believe that it is the two of them together who are causing these disruptions in time._

_Not only that, they are locking us in, so that we may not warn anyone who could cut us loose._

_Therefore, Noor, we are stuck on the slow path together. I can only pass along this torch and hope that you find a way to fling its light far enough into the future for someone to see and act on our behalf._

_Bonne chance, mon ami._

_Ada Gordon_

* * *

##  **Sound the Drums of War**

by TwoHeartsCantLose

Rating: 

Teen And Up Audiences

**Archive Warning: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings**

Categories: 

F/M

Fandoms: 

Eurydice (Series)

Relationships: 

Eurydice/Orpheus

Characters: 

Eurydice, Orpheus, Oracle, King of Angels, Storm Lord, Saucy Jack, Maria Jameson

Additional Tags: 

Dark!Eurydice, Light!Orpheus, Star-Crossed Lovers, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Enemies to Lovers, Slow Burn, #BannedBooksWeek

Language: 

English

Stats:

Published: 2014-11-01 Updated: 2015-09-19 Words: 25645 Chapters: 12/? Comments: 51 Kudos: 112 Bookmarks: 54 Hits: 3229

###  Summary: 

The Kingdom of Angels has lasted for nine hundred years, under the watchful eye of its ruler, the Dark Empress Eurydice. Only the Resistance, led by the Light Mage Orpheus, has any chance of bringing freedom back to the land… but before they can make their final strike, Orpheus is taken prisoner by Eurydice. Is all hope lost, or can the leader of the Resistance win her hearts in time?

Author’s Note: This all started with a debate I was having with @MyOracle77 about what would have happened if Eurydice hadn’t taken off the Helm, and she said that Orfy wouldn’t have stood for that, so I thought “well, okay, what if they didn’t meet until after that?” And HERE WE ARE, I guess? Not sure where this is going cuz I’ve only got a few chapters planned so far. Thanks to @frrriend2lovr for the beta! <3 <3 <3

Disclaimer: I do not own Eurydice or any of the associated characters; all copyright belongs to Noor Inayat Khan. 

* * *

###  **Interview:** **_Nationwide,_ ** **23 November 1980**

**Sue Lawley (SL):** Good evening. Tonight, we are joined in the studio by Dame Noor Inayat Khan, a woman whose creations live in the minds and on the bookshelves of children the world over. Last month, one more honor was added to her list of accolades: the co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Thank you for joining me, Ms. Inayat Khan.

 **Noor Inayat Khan (NIK):** It’s a pleasure to be here, Sue.

 ** _SL:_ **I must confess that this is a bit of a personal thrill for me. Like many people watching, I imagine, the Eurydice books were a favourite of mine when I was a child. This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of the first book in the series. Did their popularity come as a surprise to you?

 _**NIK:** _I think most writers secretly hope that their work will become beloved. Not for money necessarily, though I am sure there are some out there for whom that is the top priority. For me, writing is a way of communicating with the future.

 _**SL:** _Communicating what sorts of things?

 _**NIK:** _The present, the past, things that might have been, or things that were once but are no longer. Dreams. Warnings. But it’s all very one-way. People in the future may hear my words, but I’ll never hear back from them.

 _**SL:** _You were a wireless operator in Paris during the war. Did that influence the way you think about communication?

 _**NIK:** _I suppose it made me a little less direct. You never knew back then if the Nazis were listening in, so you had to learn how to convey things—sometimes very important things—without saying them outright. After the war, there were so many things that I couldn’t bring myself to say except in a roundabout manner. Myths and stories were one of the ways I found that I could speak.

 _**SL:** _Such as the Greek myth that the first Eurydice story was based on?

 _**NIK:** _Yes.

 _**SL:** _Though it went very differently from the original.

 _**NIK:** _Sometimes the best way to convey information is to begin with something the audience is familiar with and then draw their attention to the places where the differences lie.

 _**SL:** _Eurydice in particular is rather dissimilar to her mythical counterpart. She’s set the standard for the modern trickster-type heroine. You’ve always been reticent about whether she was based on someone. Is there a reason for that?

 _**NIK:** _If there was such a person out there, what difference would it make? 

_**SL:** _Yes, I suppose that someone like Eurydice—or Orpheus, for that matter—would have a habit of drawing attention to themselves, wouldn’t they?

 _**NIK:** _If the events of my life have taught me anything, Sue, it is that a great many things can be overlooked even if they happen in plain sight, no matter how audacious they are. It’s one of Eurydice’s strengths, in fact: she plays the fool and causes others to underestimate her.

 _**SL:** _A trait that we’ve seen in many other trickster characters—and, like them, she falls victim to her own traps on occasion.

 _**NIK:** _I’m not sure she can help herself.

 _**SL:** _ The sixth book in particular, _Eurydice and the Demon’s Mask:_ she and Orpheus really did get themselves into quite a ridiculous situation—but I seem to be indulging in a bit of commentary rather than interviewing you. [laughs] I’ll try to rein in my enthusiasm.

 _**NIK:** _[laughs] It’s quite alright, Sue. I’m glad to hear that you’re a fan.

 _**SL:** _Time is a frequent theme in your stories. Could you talk a bit about why?

 _**NIK:** _It goes back to the war as well, in a way. There were figures, you see: wireless operators in occupied territories had an average life expectancy of six weeks. I lasted just shy of four months before I was discovered. I think quite often about those extra ten weeks, because it wasn’t time that I had won or achieved through some kind of merit. I was no more cautious than any other operator in my network. Time seems to be handed out to us at random, with no rhyme or reason, and I began imagining a world where it did make sense: where there were people who could change things. But, of course, altering the nature of time would have its benefits and drawbacks. It’s not a power that I would entrust to most people.

 _**SL:** _Those are quite heavy themes. Why did you decide to write books for children instead of for adults? 

_**NIK:** _I had written children’s books before the war, and it was a craft that I found suited me better than writing for adults. But, more importantly, I think that children understand what you referred to as “heavy” themes even better than grown-ups do. Children are timeless creatures, aren’t they? I suppose Eurydice and Orpheus are like that too: children outside of time, wandering around and getting into messes.

 _**SL:** _Do you view them as your children?

 _**NIK:** _No. I think they’re far too dangerous for that sort of thing.

 _**SL:** _They’re quite the mischievous pair, aren’t they?

 _**NIK:** _If you’re outside the story, yes. But mischief is just danger seen from a distance. 

_**SL:** _Now, for the question I’m sure many of our viewers are waiting for: are there to be any further books in the series?

 _**NIK:** _[laughs] Your timing is impeccable, Sue.

 _**SL:** _Oh?

 _**NIK:** _Earlier today, I gave notice to my publisher: I am writing the final three books in the series now. They will be released starting next winter.

 _**SL:** _Well, that's a scoop I didn’t expect to get. Three books, you said?

 _**NIK:** _Yes. It’s to be a trilogy. 

_**SL:** _I know I’m probably pushing my luck here, but could you tell us anything about the plot?

 ** _NIK:_ **It’s the end of the story. A countdown, I suppose. They’re going to bring it to an end.

 _**SL:** _Bring what to an end?

[silence]

 _**SL:** _Ms. Inayat Khan?

 ** _NIK:_ **Yes?

 _**SL:** _You said that they were going to “bring it to an end.” Bring what, precisely, to an end?

 ** _NIK:_ **Everything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't worry, this is not the last we'll see of Ada, Noor, or the Eurydice series!
> 
> As I mentioned in the notes for the previous chapter, I'll be taking a brief hiatus before launching into the Classic Series, since I have to rewatch some episodes that I haven't seen in ages. In the meantime, I'll be occasionally posting shorter stories in my other Doctor Who AU, _Two Can Play At That Game,_ so feel free to subscribe to that if you want stuff to read while waiting for the next chapter.
> 
> Thanks so much to everyone who's read, commented, and/or left kudos! I love chatting with folks in the comments or on Tumblr (much like the Master, I too am a messy bitch who craves attention).


End file.
